Good morning! I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving, and that no one is going too crazy over all the Black Friday deals. I’m trying my hardest to resist the urge to shop some more, so instead I’m just going to do my nails.
This week’s design was SUPER easy. I think the hardest part was making sure I had a nice straight line for the tips. So for the design, my boyfriend has been obsessed with an image he saw once of matte black nails with a glossy tip, and he has been so persistent about me doing it too that i finally caved. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a good link to the original image (they all just take me to random compilations). But, if you just google search “matte black nails with glossy tips” you’ll find an assortment of images of exactly what I was going for.
My biggest opposition to doing this particular design is that I don’t normally wear dark/black nail polish. The only times I will wear something dark is if it is on my toes. So I’ve decided to lighten things up a bit by adding gold polka dots. Which now that I think of it, I’m not a big polka dot person either. So I guess this week will just be all new things for me!
What I used:
- Base Coat: Glisten & Glow – Stuck on Blu! (recently renamed to Base Coat)
- 1st Color: Sally Hansen Hard as Nails – Black Out
- 2nd Color: Sally Hansen Color Therapy- Glow with the Flow
- Matte Top Coat: Essie – Matte About You
- Glossy Top Coat: Glisten & Glow – HK Girl (recently renamed to Top Coat)
- nail polish remover
- Twinkled T clean up brush, size #2
- french tip nail stencils
- Bundle Monster dual sided nail art brush/dotting tool
- small plastic cup
So I started this off with the usual base coat, but I was extra thorough considering I was about to put on some seriously black nail polish. And then a single coat of the Black Out polish. I’m extremely happy that it’s a one coat polish; it just makes my life so much easier to do less layers. Then I put the french tip nail stencils on so that the polka dots have a hard edge before the tip. I used a tiny plastic cup to hold the rose gold polish for easier dotting. (I still don’t know why my roommate bought them, but they’ve been very useful)
Once I was absolutely sure my polka dots were dry, I put on the glossy top coat to even everything out. I’ve learned from experience that you need to put on glossy top coat before the matte, or else it will show every single bump and mistake. Then when I was sure the glossy top coat was dry, I had to put on more of the french tip nail stencils in order to keep the tips glossy. I’ve also learned from experience, not to put on too thick of a layer of the matte top coat. I’m not sure if it’s just this particular matte top coat, but it just looks strangely streaky if you do too much.
Well these nails took forever (a good four hours), but that was because I had to work from home this morning and most of my time was spent doing that. I also only could do one hand at a time in order to keep the other hand available for work/typing.
As reluctant as I was to do these nails, I’m so incredibly happy with how they turned out. I didn’t have any screw ups along the way, and they just look fun. I hope you don’t mind that this post is a few hours later than normal. The holiday really threw me off my schedule.
I’d love to know what kind of nail designs would be completely out of the normal for you. Let me know below
Update:
For the most part these nails lasted the whole week without any chipping, and just had the usual wear along the edges. But on Tuesday night, I was working on some handmade Christmas presents and was NOT being gentle on my hands. So of course, I ended up with a chip on my thumb nail. But that was an easy fix that lasted for the most part. You can see in the end that my thumb ended up chipping again, but I don’t care since I’m taking them off now. Now I just have to cross my fingers and hope that these come off stain-free!
Weekly Nail 