Essie Winter 2012 Collection Part 2: Dots

Hi everyone! This is the second part in a small series of simple manicures using the Essie Winter 2012 collection. You can see the first post here. The idea of using this collection to do some easy nail art actually came from my Tumblr blog. When I posted my New Year's Eve dot manicure there, it was insanely popular. It's my most shared and liked post on Tumblr, and it was my first post to be featured with the nail art tag. The popularity of that image caught me off guard, but one reason (I think) that it was so well-liked was that it was pretty basic and easy to do, even for beginners.

Essie Winter 2012 collection dot manicure

Today I took the dot manicure one step further to work with multiple colours. My inspiration was this mani I saw on Vampy Varnish. I used Essie She's Pampered as my base. This is a beautiful cool-toned red creme, almost a raspberry red colour. The consistency was a bit thin, so it wanted to pool in my cuticles, but otherwise it had great coverage and levelled perfectly. This was two coats. I really love this red colour, it's very flattering and I could see myself wearing it a lot.

Essie Winter 2012 collection dot manicure

Using my dotting tools I started with Beyond Cozy. When those dots were dry, I followed with Where's My Chauffeur, then when that polish was dry, I finished with Butler Please. I used three different sizes of dotting tools, one for each polish.

Essie Winter 2012 collection dot manicure

I find the finished results to be a bit busy for my taste. I wish I made less dots, and maybe a bit more range in the size of dots, with some smaller ones. But I'm sure it's not the last time that I'll pick up my dotting tools. ;) In terms of difficulty, this was no more difficult than using one colour. A few of the dots are uneven because of how they were layered over other dots. But those minute details don't bother me.

What do you think? Do you like dot manicures, and if so, what's your favourite way to do them?