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Hi everyone!
Today’s 31 Day Challenge theme is metallic. I feel like I’m cheating a little, both in terms of the theme and my vow to go freehand all month, although technically I do have both covered. This one is picture heavy!
To start off with, I wanted to finally try the holo powder nails that have been all the rage recently. You may have seen these as well as versions with a more linear holo, and mirror-like chrome effect nails. The chrome nails became a ‘thing’ first and I didn’t have the powder needed to try it out. Once a few people started doing holo nails, I realised that I could probably just use some of the fine holo powder I’d bought for my hobby polish making. 
It worked and the result was very strongly holographic. I used a powder from spectraflair4u, and I think they even have a couple of different sizes available. I did use gel polish to do this as I realised it would be far easier than trying to use regular polish and get it at just the right moment when it’s dry enough not to rub off, but tacky enough for the powder to stick. Since I didn’t have black gel, I used blue. I just rubbed the pigment into the tacky layer of the cured gel and it worked perfectly. I did add a gel top coat over the top to protect it. I’ve seen a few places saying you need a no-wipe topcoat for this, but I didn’t have one and I didn’t run into problems using my regular gel top coat. It could be that the no-wipe works better for the chrome nails look, but since I haven’t tried that yet, I can’t really say. If you’re wondering how this is metallic, well, I believe that holo powders are often made from metallic compounds, although to be honest I’m not certain what this specific one is made of. Just go with it! 
Just look at all that holo! On the macro you can see the individual holo particles, of course you’d get a different effect if you had an even finer holo size. 
This is where the freehand part of the look comes in. My original idea was to do the holo powder, and then just add a freehand border with acrylic paint to give it a little more oomph. I think it worked, I like the frame and simple as it may be, I did freehand it. 
Because of how curved my nails are, you can’t clearly see the frame on the edges of each nail, but it’s there. Once that was done, however, it looked like the perfect frame for some stamping, so I added some in. 
I stamped using Born Pretty store plate BP-X15, which I recently reviewed. I really love this stamping plate and it looked amazing with the holo! 
So, the freehand definitely wasn’t the main feature of this look. Not even the second-to-main feature, since both the stamping and the holo are more attention-grabbing. To be honest, once the stamping was added, you don’t even really realise the freehanded frame is there any more. Oh, well – hopefully you like these nails enough to make it count nonetheless! 
I couldn’t resist adding one more macro of that amazing holographic goodness! In previous years, I’ve done a metallic tape mani, and a gold quatrefoil pattern.
Check out some more metallic nails at these links:
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