CQ Deep Blue Sea Illusion Stripes

Hi Everyone!!  Happy Valentine's Day! I feel so much better today! I got over a nasty cold and overall, I think things are looking up. I have some big personal news coming up in a little while that I can't reveal yet but I'll entertain guesses!

In the meantime, I have a very un-Valentine mani for you. Not because I don't like the holiday or anything. My husband and I are just not making a very big deal of it this year. Which is fine with me because I am ready to go to sleep and we haven't even eaten dinner yet. Dinner that my husband made, though, so I guess that was rather sweet of him :-)

I think I saw something similar on Pinterest with different colors and I had always wanted to try the look myself. It's all done freehand with nothing more than the brush from the polish bottle itself. I started with the darkest color and then just painted the lighter colors in narrower and narrower bands ending with the lightest color, the white.

The colors I used are shown below. The darkest blue is CQ Deep Blue Sea. I love blues like this. So simple but with so much depth. The next two are Love & Beauty Blue and Aqua. The white is from Sinful Colors.

I love the look of the stripes because it gives such an illusion of reflecting a bright light from further away. 

This is Deep Blue Sea by itself: