Nail Art: Beetle-Inspired Duochrome Stripes

While swatching OPI's Kermit Me to Speak, I was struck by how beautiful and strong the duochrome in it was. The lavender-to-golden-olive chromatic shift in the polish reminded me so much of a beetle's wings.

"So," I thought, " why the heck don't I make some beetle wing inspired nail art?!"

I didn't want to go for a literal interpretation, so I tried to do something with lines and color to invoke the image.



This is actually a pretty easy and straightforward manicure. There weren't really any big tricks or techniques or polishes that went into creating this look.

Since I was working off of a swatched color, I obviously started with a solid base of Kermit Me to Speak on all of my fingers. I tried to think of what other polishes I had that would work for the beetle look, and I landed on Julep's Angela. This is deep green polish with a very subtle duochrome shift to a deep blue. I figured that the two duochrome polishes might work well together.

To create the green lines, I mentally divided each nail into thirds and placed a piece of scotch tape on the left and right of the nail, leaving the center third open. I painted the exposed area with Angela and immediately removed the tape to create a strong, clean line.

On ring finger, I wanted to try a different design. My original plan was to have the same green stripe down the center, black on the sides and a thin stripe of Kermit Me to Speak peeking through to divide the two colors. I did this using striping tape (bought from BornPretty... and my affiliate code is NJX31 if you want 10% off your order). Sadly, I should have doubled up the tape since it was a bit TOO thin and just didn't look right. Instead, I took gold polish and tried to paint lines of gold to divide the black and green polishes.  They didn't come out very even since I was using a paint brush that I tried to cut down....but at least my nail art brushes have arrived since I did this manicure and I shouldn't have that issue in the future!

The one thing I'm sad about is that almost all of these pictures show only the olive-gold side of the Kermit Me to Speak duochrome spectrum. In reality, there was a lot more of the lavender showing that the camera just wasn't picking up.

Polishes / Items used in this manicure were:

• Lavender/ Olive duochrome (outer stripes): OPI - Kermit Me to Speak
• Green duochrome (center stripe): Julep - Angela
• Black (ring finger outer stripes): Salon Perfect - Oil Slick
• Gold stripes (ring finger):  Salon Perfect - Gold Leaf

In the end, it didn't turn out that bad. I think I want to try to revisit the idea in the future.... or at least try a similar manicure with different colors.