On Wednesday's We Wear Pink - Orly Flirty Spun Sugar Mani

Hi there! I have been wanting to get involved in a challenge for a while now, and I decided a fun/easy one for me to try out would be On Wednesday's We Wear Pink. If you have ever seen the movie Mean Girls, it's a really cute/funny scene in the movie. To be included in this challenge I added the picture to the side of my blog, and on Wednesday's ... you guessed it... we wear pink! It doesn't have to be every Wednesday, but I thought it would be a great way for me to get through my numerous pink polishes and gradually become involved in challenges.

Okay, so on to the design. I've seen this called a "spun sugar" design in the blog world, and I have been wanting to try this design for a while (here is a great YouTube tutorial to show this technique). Two amazing examples of this are by Chalkboard Nails and Manicurator. To do this, you basically just drop some polish onto a paper plate and as the polish begins to dry and get tacky and stringy, you dip a dotting tool (or something similar), into the polish and the stringy polish that hangs from it gets laid across your nail. It sounds easy, but I struggled with it... it seems like the polish I was using was taking SO long to get tacky. I may be better off finding some older polishes if I try this again.

For this mani I started with two coats of OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls, and the strings are Orly Flirty. The above two photos are without topcoat. I love the dimension of this design, 3D nail art! But, I knew from when I started that I was going to have to put top coat on this bad boy, or it would never dry! So, below are the unfortunate after shots with Seche Vite on top. It just, doesn't look as cool to me...  the pink got all smeary looking and it just ended up looking messy to me. I still got a few compliments on it, and at a distance I guess I don't mind it, just not sure if I'll be trying this technique again. Which way do you prefer, with or without topcoat?

PS - Don't forget to enter my giveaway to win a bottle of Nail-Venturous Floam! It's open until December 6th!