HPB Presents Pastel Galaxy Nails

I have been a member of a group called ‘Hobby Polish Bloggers’ for quite a while now. Every month there is a blog link up where each person does a mani around a selected theme. This month’s theme is space, so I decided I had to join in as I really wanted to try and do galaxy nails. I had originally planned on doing a traditional galaxy design with a black background, but when I googled galaxy nails, I couldn’t get over how pretty all the pastel galaxy nails looked.

To create my pastel galaxy nails, I first did one coat of white (Pretty Serious Absence), it wasn’t completely opaque but that’s fine when sponging colours over it.  I then used an ordinary triangle makeup sponge to make the pastel background. I put random dots of my colours on the sponge and dabbed that on the nail, reapplying the colours after each dab. I used a light pink (Powder Perfect Search The Kingdom), a blue (Pretty Serious Doodle Bug) and a Purple (Pretty Serious Cutie Patootie). To make cleanup easier, I used some Small Nail Apron Vinyls from Loki’s Lacquer and then used a small clean up brush and acetone to get clean up close to the cuticle line. Please forgive my flakey cuticles, I’ve had a reaction to a product I was using, but they will be better soon enough. Once the background colours and cleanup was done, I top coated it all with KB Shimmer Clearly On Top, but any fast dry top coat would do. I really like the look of the random pastel colours by themselves and I will probably do that again as a mani in future, but they don’t look much like a galaxy by themselves.

To make the cloud look (the part that is the galaxy), I ripped off a little piece of makeup sponge and sponged on an off white (Powder Perfect Turtledoves) in different directions on each nail. The key with this part is to dab off some of the polish before dabbing onto the nail so that you can get the cloudy look. Next time, I would use a smaller bit of sponge and make sure I dab off the polish more to ensure they look more cloudy and less like white lines. I then used Pretty Serious Absence and a toothpick to dot on some small white dots to make stars. Once the colours were dry, I topcoated it all. After a day or so I decided to use Cirque Colors We Trippy (a sheer holographic topcoat) to add some sparkle to the mani. It didn’t turn out exactly how I was picturing it to, but I like the end result.

I really love all the polishes I used in this mani, I’m so glad there are indies making good quality creme polishes now. Cutie Patootie and Doodle Bug are from the Pretty Serious Cosmetics Pastel Pet Names Collection which I plan on using in another mani soon, so sign up to email updates to get notified of that. Pretty Serious and Powder Perfect are both Aussie indies but each brand also has a warehouse in the USA to make postage quicker for international customers. On the Pretty Serious Website you choose if you’re a US/CAN customer before you add anything to your cart, whereas you go to a completely separate site for Powder Perfect. So Australian customers use the Australian Powder Perfect Website and USA customers use the International Powder Perfect Website. You can get 10% off your order from either Powder Perfect site if you use the code ALINTA before the end of July.

I am really hopeless when it comes to nail art, so if I can do pastel galaxy nails, anyone can. My shakes and blurry vision made this mani extra hard to complete, but thankfully it’s a design that doesn’t need perfect strokes. You can see the space designs others have created below. What sort of space mani would you do? If you did pastel galaxy nails, what pastel colours would you choose?