Rainbow Gradient

For this rainbow gradient look I decided to start at orange on my thumbs and go to purple on my pinkies. I did not include red or indigo. I achieved this look by sponging. I picked out one light and one dark shade for each color on my nails. I decided not to use red because I didn't feel like having any pink.

I started out with a coat of Essie Protein Base Coat and then painted on 2-3 coats of all my pastel base colors. I started with pastel bases because I didn't want to be sponging light colors over dark colors. On my thumbs I used three coats of Essie Haute as Hello; on my pointers, three coats of Sinful Colors Unicorn; middles--two coats of NYC High Line Green; rings--two coats of Essie Borrowed & Blue; and two coats of Rimmel Wild Orchid on my pinkies. After that had all dried I applied one coat of Sally Hansen Dries Instantly so that the sponge wouldn't remove my base color. I then got to sponging. For all of the colors, I put a stripe of my base color and a stripe of my darker gradient color slightly overlapping on the sponge. I then stippled that on my nails and applied more polish to the sponge as needed. I used a couple pieces of sponge and used different sides of them for the different colors. You can get many uses out of one sponge.

Here are the darker shades I used: orange--NYC Spring Street; yellow--Avon Sunshine; green--Revlon Rain Forest (which is actually glittery, but you can't notice it that much with the glitter over top of all my nails); blue--Rimmel Blue Eyed Girl; and purple--Revlon Impulsive. I decided to put some fine, iridescent glitter over top of the gradient (Sally Hansen Diamonds). I finished off with two coats of Dries Instantly.