For my koi 🎏

Products used:

• Basecoat: Nailtiques formula 1
• Penelope Luz Best Year (PPU Jan '26) magnetized glass bead
• "Red Koi Fish Nail Art Sticker" from Amazon
• Topcoat: liquid glass from a brand I no longer support

Best Year dispersed a ton on me, but it really is lovely and I've been getting tons of comments on it. The background is purple with a bright sky blue magnetic pull.

I'll post a better picture of the mani in the comments. I recorded this video in the garage, and the fluorescent light in there doesn't do justice to the polish! Backstory on this mani involves pet loss, so I'm spoiler tagging it:

During COVID my husband and I decided to build a koi pond in our backyard. It's been our oasis when the world is crazy. We had 5 koi and dozens of goldfish. They were chilling as normal this winter (they go into a torpor and don't do much of anything until the water warms), until in early January I woke up one morning to what I thought was every fish in the pond dead. We were devastated. The cause was the autodoser that added dechlorinator to the water malfunctioned and didn't add dechlorinator… so the fish all died of chlorine toxicity.

2 days after this happened, Sol, the koi in the video cand one goldfish came out from the cave in the pond alive but in rough shape. Sol is the first koi we added to the pond and he comes and eats out of our hands. We immediately made a fish hospital in our garage using a 300 gallon stock tank. We are fortunate to have a local veterinarian that specializes in fish, and they helped us nurse Sol and the goldfish back to health over the course of a month.

My hands were in water daily during that time period, so my nails got really beat up. But, now that my nails are finally doing a bit better and Sol is almost back to his normal self I wanted to do a mani to honor him and the koi and goldfish I lost.