Dress Inspired Nail Art!

Nail art inspiration happens all the time with lots of different things. This time, it was this gorgeous dress from Light In The Box that my friend Kim shared and I knew instantly that I would love this color combo on my nails! I set out to do the awesome top half of the dress (as you see on the left hand side of the collage below), but I fell in love with the fan brush gradient on my tips and decided to take that off and do a full mani as the gradient instead (shown on the right side of the collage below). 

So we will start with the top half of the dress since that's where I originally started. I used the same chevron shaped tip guides from the Sticky Nails pack I showed you HERE to create the neck line of the dress.  The colors I used: Illamasqua Nomad (which is more mint green than the original dress color), Nicole by OPI Teal Me Something New, OPI No Room For The Blues, and Milani Blue Zoom. I free handed the dress shapes and then used a fan brush to do the gradient tips. (More info on that below)

Have you ever done a gradient with a fan brush before? I had seen this tutorial over at Neverland Nail Blog a while back and have been wanting to try it ever since but never did. It was so easy and I love the results! So my current full mani is the one I'm showing you below. I started with a base color of Illamasqua Nomad and then did the gradient with all 4: Illamasqua Nomad (which is more mint green than the original dress color), Nicole by OPI Teal Me Something New, OPI No Room For The Blues, and Milani Blue Zoom. Showing with top coat.

Fan brush gradients have a really cool "textured" effect instead of being so smooth like when you use a sponge. It took less layers and that meant much less cleanup on my skin as well! What do you think? Which look do you prefer? Thanks so much for reading!

*Some polishes and the Sticky Nails guides are previous press samples. Their names are linked to the original posts and have been reviewed with my honest opinion.