35. Dating a Royal/Nail Art - Midnight Half Moons

Dating a Royal is a gorgeous deep blue jelly.  Admittedly, I'm not very good at telling the difference between creams and jellys yet (which is a sign I need more jellys), but other swatches and my experience applying this suggest that it is indeed a jelly.  I absolutely LOVE this color!  It's very flattering on my skin, and it is such an elegant color without being too soft.  When I saw the bottle, I knew I just HAD to have it.  And I'm glad I did get it, it's one of my go-to polishes.  It makes me very calm when I look at it, and I could just stare at it for days :)  And the fact that it's a jelly means that it has a lot of extra depth and that special squishy look that you cannot get from looking at a cream; it's kind of like looking at the sky. <3

Formula's a little watery on this polish, but other than that, there weren't many issues with application.  Here shown is 2 thick coats, but 3 regular coats would be necessary for full opacity.

The reason I'm doing a combined post on my nail art and the swatch is because I may have accidentally deleted all my pictures of DAR.  Oops!

Okay, so they aren't exactly the color of the sky at midnight, but these nails did remind me of a night sky with some golden stars :)  Today, I have a half-moon mani.  I used half of those paper-hole reinforcers to make the half moons.  This is 2 coats of American Apparel's Gold Flash as the base, with 2 coats of OPI's Dating a Royal on top.  I absolutely love this color combination!  The pairing of the deep blue with the gold looks elegant and mesmerizing!

This mani gave me so much trouble.  The thing about me and tape manicures is that I am too impatient and put down the tape before the polish is fully dry.  Then, when I try to take off the tape, the entire base layer of polish will peel off with the tape :(  Luckily, that only happened on 2 nails, so I just started over on those nails; it's still annoying though.

Half moon manis are pretty awesome!  I really like how this one turned out, and I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've successfully done one :)