Hot, Hot Gradient

The past few days in Toronto have been SWELTERING, and I've been cooped up in the house on my days off avoiding the heat at all costs. It felt like 35 degrees at 8:30 in the morning when I bravely decided to venture to Tim Horton's for an iced coffee! I simply adore the miracle of air conditioning.

I've only done gradient nails once before; twice if you count that one that I did on a nail wheel that didn't turn out so well. With that in mind, going in to doing this mani, I was prepared to fail. I followed a tutorial from The Beauty Department.

Here are the polishes that I used:

L to R: Wet 'n' Wild Sunny Side Up, Wet 'n' Wild Blazed, Wet 'n' Wild Dreamy Poppy, Rimmel Sunset Orange, Sally Hansen Caribbean Coral

You can also see the makeup wedge that I used in the background. I had a bit of a problem figuring out what order the colours would go in, though. The middle polish was a lot more pink than the others and I couldn't figure out where it fit in. I took a couple of pictures that display the evolution of the order of the colours in this gradient.

Eventually I settled on the bottom picture's colour scheme, with the pink right below the Caribbean Coral. If you're not familiar, what you do is soak the makeup wedge in water and then squeeze out most of the water until it's just damp to the touch. Then, you paint on stripes of colour on the sponge in order and dab it a few times on a piece of paper so the colours blend a little bit before you finally sponge it onto your nail.

The tutorial didn't mention anything about painting a base colour on your nails before doing the sponging, but for this mani I decided it would look a lot more blended and bright if I painted my nails a bright orange first, so I started with one coat of Sunny Side Up, a polish that I salvaged from the dead with some Orly polish thinner, that I had bought just that morning...like I knew that I would need it!

Indoors, flash

Indoors, Natural Light

Sunlight

I'm really happy about how this turned out. The base colour, which normally leans more yellow, turned into a more bright, pink-leaning hue with the coral shades sponged over it. It kind of reminds me of a blood orange. This gradient technique was a little bit time consuming, but easy nevertheless. I will definitely be trying this again sometime.