Manicure Monday (67): Ruin and Rising

 

Manicure Monday is a feature that combines my love or reading and nail polish. Each week I'll showcase one of my current reads along with a matching book manicure.

Hello and happy Monday, everyone. Today's manicure is for the newly released Ruin and Rising by Leigh Bardugo. While this technically does not come out until tomorrow, I heard that some B&N had them out early. I went in search of it over the weekend and happily was able to find it at my local store. I decided to do this manicure today because I am going to the launch party for Ruin and Rising tonight, which is being held in downtown LA at The Last Bookstore. It should be a really good time and I hope to see some of you there.

I love the covers to this entire series. They are so striking and work well individually but also make a nice set when seen together. The cover to Ruin and Rising is much darker and more ominous looking than the last two covers. Looking at this cover, I knew that I wanted to do a gradient as part of this manicure. Using three shades of Zoya polish in Sooki, Rekha and Paris, I created a gradient on three of my fingers. I arranged it so the darkest color was at the base of my nails. Then I wanted to create a splatter effect to mimic the center part of the cover where there are faint splatters of gold on the red. I had a really hard time finding a gold that was as orange as the one from this cover. However, after much digging I was able to find a good match in Wet N Wild The Gold and the Beautiful (yes, nail polish companies do love pun-y names). I made the splatter by dipping a small mixing straw into the polish and blowing it onto the nails.

The grey I used was actually a polish that was given out as a promo product when Shadow & Bone was first released. So far, there has been a polish for each book. Shadow & Bone's polish was a matte grey creme. I used two coats of the Grisha Grey on my thumb and ring finger. I used black acrylic paint to paint the stripes on my ring finger. 

For my thumb, I decided to pull an element from the central tower on the R&R cover. I painted the turrets with black acrylic paint and dotted on red polish to match the tower.

Bonus pic of my right hand, which I usually don't show because it's often the same as my left and it's sort of annoying to take pics of your non-dominant hand. However, I did my read hand a little differently this time so I thought it would be fun to show it.

And there you have it - nails ready for a Grisha party. Hope you guys liked today's manicure. If you're at the launch tomorrow and see me, please come say hello. :)