A Tale of Two Gradients

I love nail gradients.

But I had very little idea of how to do them, so I experimented. Here are the results.

 That middle brown looks a lot like milk chocolate. Yum.

In the first, I simply painted a base color (Zoya Dea), then painted on top of it from the cuticle and tip using Zoya Cheryl and Goldie.

Advantages:

• Thick, vibrant colors.
• The gold had a really cool fire effect.
• No additional tools required.
• No wasted polish.

Disadvantages:

• Time-consuming.
• Technical.
• To get that really cool fire effect of the gold, I had to start with just enough polish on the brush to get a solid color on the tip, and then have it taper 1/4" in.  It was complicated to get right.
• It's not really a gradient, but more of a neapolitan ice cream look.
• Thick paint means a loooooong time to dry, and higher chance of getting air bubbles.

 Despite the disadvantages, I did really like this design and was sad to have to remove it.

 The second design... well, it wasn't very photogenic:

 I wore this with a purple-and-white print shirt.

I used four colors: black, Cheryl, Merlot and Zoya Kamilah.  For this design, instead of painting directly on the nails, I painted onto a makeup sponge, and then pressed the sponge to the nails.  I learned quickly that for decent coverage, I needed to reload the sponge between each use.  In the picture, you can see that the pinky nail has very deep, solid color, but the pointer and middle fingernails are thin enough to see the light nail tip.  Whoops.

Advantages:

• Quick and easy.
• It's a real gradient.
• Therefore, it looks very cool (despite the inexplicable failure of the camera to make it look that way).

Disadvantages:

• Easy to forget to reload the sponge, so it's easy to end up with thin paint on a few nails.
• Requires use of a makeup sponge.
• Wasted a lot of paint due to deep soaking into the sponge.
• Messy - required a lot of cleanup.

Despite the weird image quality, I actually liked this design better than the first, because it's a true gradient, and unless you're inspecting it closely you can't really see how thin the polish is.

It also looks like actual fire, which is awesome.