Nail Art

Ever since I managed to quit nail biting, I've gotten into nail art. It's opened a whole new world of bright bold colors for me and my nails. I decided to invest in these cute nail gems which only cost me about $8 for 144 stones- from Broadway Nails. You get an assortment of shapes like heart, round, petal and flowers shaped stones as well as glue and a topcoat. I'm quite pleased with the results though I do need to get more creative with the patterns. The good thing is I may even be able to re use them if I take really good care of them.

Here's my how-to guide:
1. Apply a basecoat. I never knew how important this was til recently. It smooths ridges and makes nail polish go on smoother and stay on. If you missed it, here is my recommendation for a budget friendly basecoat.)

2. Apply 1-2 coats of your favorite polish. For more a more detailed explanation on applying nail polish perfectly go here. Make sure you let dry properly between coats. I usually just watch tv or go on the elliptical at home in between coats.

3. Apply the nail glue and (with tweezers apply) nail stones to your nails.

4. Sometimes I use gel pens. Metallic colored pens or even pastel to paint on patterns on nails. I find it easiest to work with patterns which include dots, not lines. Why? It's way too hard painting on lines with my left hand. I invested in a set of metallic gel pens with the colors silver, gold, blue, red, green, and purple.

5. Dab the topcoat- DON'T stroke the brush- onto the painted pattern. Stroking it over the pattern like you would with nail polish will smudge all your hard work. I recommend "Sally Hansen Hard As Nails" (about $2-3 and adds high shine).

6. Allow the dabbed on topcoat to dry then brush over all your nails with proper coating.

Here you can see I stuck a red heart-stone in the top corner and painted on 3 silver dots. Still working on getting more creative.

Here are some patterns you can recreate:

You can try these looks by buying nail stickers, glueing them on with adhesive then applying a top coat. Add stones to jazz up the nail stickers:

One more TIP: I recommend using more of the PASTEL pens, instead of metallic gel ones. For some reason, the metallic ones don't dry much, the pastel ones do! So every time I try doing my nails entirely with metallic red, blue, green, etc it smudges! Try doing a white flower and only a silver center for instance. Or add a stone in the middle instead.

Also, if you can it's always much easier to have a friend paint your left hand for you. That's why I stick with dot patterns: much easier to do with my left hand.