makeup wedge | Craftynail

Hi y’all! Ready for some holographic goodness for day 17?? I absolutely love my L.A. Girl 3D Effects polishes and I’ve used them 5 times already on my blog. Here comes L.A. Girl holo post # 6 for today’s GRADIENT theme!

I usually do my gradient with a small sliver of sponge and my ‘dabbing’ technique (see my technique here) because I find it clean and effective. But for today’s look I went with the standard gradient technique that I usually see online which is to apply stripes of polish on a full makeup wedge. Even though I applied glue around my nails to help with cleanup- pressing the makeup wedge onto my nails made my cuticles get covered with polish- so I’ll probably switch back to my dabbing technique next time! If you’re interested in the glue I use to help with cleanup you can view my old post here.

Here’s the polishes I used:

Orange ♥ L.A. Girl 3D Effects Electric Coral

Red ♥ L.A. Girl 3D Effects Ruby Sparkle

Black ♥ L.A. Girl 3D Effects Black Illusion

View the other participants’ GRADIENTS here:

17. Gradient :

Today’s nails were inspired by my inner child! When I was a little girl (back in the 80’s) I just loved rainbows! Rainbow stickers, rainbow spiral notebooks, rainbow earrings… pretty much anything that had a rainbow on it caught my attention. Too bad it took me 30+ years to discover this rainbow gradient technique! Well, this mani is dedicated to you, little Jacqui from the 80’s! I know you would’ve loved these nails. 🙂

My first attempts at gradients were total fails- until I came up with this very effective way of using makeup sponges. Here’s a pic of how I use my sponge for a gradient:

I start out with a standard cosmetic application wedge and use sharp scissors to cut it into 4 or 5 long skinny pieces. I take one of the pieces, fold it in half, and dab it into a drop of nail polish on my work surface. Then I sponge it onto my nail to create the gradient effect. I think these folded over sponge strips work well since their surface is slightly curved, yet small-so you can dab, dab, dab away to get the paint just where you want it. I use a different sliver of sponge for each color. The small surface area of the sponge worked great to get the skinny lines of color for today’s rainbow gradient… but it also works well for a larger-scale gradient (like this leopard design where I only sponged on one color). I think this technique is less messy and it’s fool-proof!! I haven’t screwed up one gradient yet since I started doing it this way !