A2Z Series - J Is For 'Jewel'

Hi NaiLovelies!

I’m back again with my manicure for the current week of the blogger A2Z Challenge.  This week we have reached the letter 'J' in the alphabet and the prompt is JEWEL.

Now, this is one manicure that I instantly knew the polish I would pick – the radiant and glowing beauty that is the jewel toned fabulousness of Berry Buttoned Up by Gelish! This is an absolutely stunning polish. When I purchased Berry Buttoned Up I knew it was a beauty and quite unique in my gel polish collection but I got even more than I bargained for with this one as it has a hidden surprise only visible once on the nail – it has a subtle duo-chrome shift from magenta toned purple, to red and back again.

I could not believe my eyes when I saw it and I can only assume this shift along with the almost metallic finish gives it that awesome glowing finish. This polish is just divine and the perfect jewel toned polish for this weeks manicure.  Oh, did I mention this one is soooo hard to capture on camera - I might have to feature it in a new stamping video at the weekend!

I chose to keep it fairly simple with the design as I want the polish to truly shine without much fuss on the nail so I delved into my ‘Ale’ bags of nail art goodies and found the perfect embellishments for this manicure, some beautiful multi-sized opalescent studs.  I added these to my nail in a paisley'esque swirl using an old thickened bottle of Seche Vite (works perfectly for me!).  I broke up the design of the jewel placement with some small opal and clear sparkly Swarovski crystals.

The 'Ale' pronouned Ally bags!

 I want to be able to wear many of my untried polishes over the top of Berry Buttoned up either as stamping, complimentary manicures tying in the existing colour or a complete cover up so keeping the gel manicure 100% smooth is essential. Therefore, I was unable to set the gems in gel polish base and topcoat.....although I wish I did because I love how it turned out!

This is an accurate photo of the colours when shifting!

 As you can see from my photos, I have chosen to return to my beloved almond shaped nails and as always, I reshaped my nails whilst wearing my previous challenge manicure. I find that this is the best way for me to achieve consistent results with the shape of my nails. If I file on naked nails and follow my smile line I can get wonky nails as my smile lines are not all 100% symmetrical and aligned. Filing whilst wearing polish lets me instantly see the end result.

You can check out the fab manicures created by the other bloggers participating in this challenge by clicking on the Inlinkz below and by visiting the hub to see all the manicures created in this challenge series.

Ciao 4 Now

An InLinkz Link-up