Oranges

As promised, I've been busy preparing more fruity swatches..this time ORANGES!

Here's the finished product:

So here's what I used:

Base colour - OPI Hot 'n' Spicy

White - OPI Alpine Snow

Yellow - SH Yello Kitty

Finishing top colour - OPI Y'all Come Back Ya Hear!

Step # 1

Hot 'n' Spicy. A bright pinky orange/coral. Very unique and difficult to describe. Slightly streaky with one coat but with 2 or more it becomes a gorgeous opaque cream with a very 'matte' sort of finish (without top coat). I started off with 2 coats of this...such a great colour! This was one of my first swatches, taken a while ago now. My nails are longer now but I think this colour is more suited to shorter nails - a great summer shade, especially this season!

Step # 2

Here I added semi-circles with Sally Hansen's Yellow Kitty, a gorgeous pastel yellow. To get the shade you see here I had to do about 3 coats of yellow as the formula is quite sheer. It dried relatively quickly though so this was not an issue.

Step # 3

It may sound odd but I wanted to make the backing colour a little brighter so I added one coat of Y'all Come Back Ya Hear - I knew it was really sheer with one coat and would just sort of 'tint' the above colours to be a little closer to the kind of orange I was after.

Here's a swatch of the colour on its own (also done a while ago):

Y'all Come Back Ya Hear. Love love LOVE this orange! This was 4 coats - seems a little excessive, I know, but by the 3rd coat you can still vaguely see the nail through the polish because it's so sheer!! In hindsight I should have just used this as the backing colour to save the hassle but I was hesitant because it really does take a long time to dry as it's a jelly polish.


Step # 4

I then painted the pattern of the cross-section of an orange using Alpine Snow for the white and finished with a few quick strokes of SH Yellow Kitty from the inside white semi-circle to the centre of the orange cross-section. I liked the "imperfect" effect that this gave - looks more realistic I think!

Here are a few more shots...

As a little finishing touch I added some orange decals I got a while back. Pretty cute but a little over the top I think haha! I probably wouldn't wear this every day but I thought since I had them I should use them: