(Subtle) Ruffian Nails - My First Attempt

I've been on a real kick of trying new things with my nail polish. I recently tried my first attempt at ombre nails (using a makeup sponge) as well as the "tape technique" for adding stripes to nails.

This week I wanted to try something else - Ruffian nails!

I've never tried Ruffian style nails before, but they are kind of like doing a reverse French tip. You basically leave a crescent moon shape at the base of your nails, along your cuticle. I've never even seen a tutorial on how to do it, so I always assumed there was some tape or possibly even reinforcer stickers involved. However, it came to my attention via a Twitter post this week that it can be done without tools or special stickers involved at all - just the nail polish brushes!

Thanks to @Swishienails for the tip and for the words of encouragement, by the way.

For her Ruffian nails, Swishie used a dusty blue polish as her base color (the color of the crescent) and another dusty blue with silver glitter as the top coat. I loved the way it looked - the top and bottom colors were nearly the same, but with a lot of glitter in the top color. I rifled through my own stash of polishes till I found two colors that could serve the same purpose... or so I thought.

.  orly preamp and rimmel baby pink  . 

After applying a top coat, I used two coats of Rimmel's Baby Pink (which you can also see in one of my favorite nail polish looks here) on all of my nails except my ring finger, which I painted with two coats of Orly's Preamp (which you can see in this throwback nail polish blog, but please forgive my cuticles in those old pics).

Next I carefully used my Preamp brush to apply it over the Baby Pink nails, trying my damnedest to make the remaining Baby Pink polish look crescent...ish. I'm sure this takes practice to perfect, so I'm giving myself a break for the slightly less than perfect crescents.

My real beef is that the colors are TOO freaking similar! You can barely tell at all that I've got two different polishes on... and thus my Ruffian style is completely lost upon everyone but myself!

So to feel better about this, I'm just telling myself in a reassuring tone that these are totally Ruffian style nails... just, liiiiike... really subtle ones. ;)

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