Stripes and Sparkles

The nails I am sharing with you today, are definitely my proudest achievement to date, not least because someone asked me who did my nails! I felt quite pleased with myself that the answer was I did them.

I was super excited to try out some of the new nail art goodies I bought, and decided to have a go with the striping tape. Half way through doing these nails, I also decided to add some of my pretty gems too :).

What I Used -  

• 17 High Gloss in Miami
• NYC Pinstripe White 134
• w7 Black 28
• NYC Top Coat Grand Central Station
• Striping tape
• Nail gems

To achieve this look I started off by painting all of my nails pink - I later made a mistake on my left hand middle finger which had to be removed, so I painted that nail white to mix it up a bit! After the base colour was completely dry, I started applying striping tape to my nails horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, leaving each middle finger with no stripes. I then painted over the striping tape with either black or white nail polish, removing the tape immediately to get nice crisp lines - this worked on all nails except my right hand little finger, where I accidentally touched the tape back down onto the wet white polish. I then added either pink or silver gems to my middle finger and thumb nails, to form a flower shape, and then topcoated the lot. Here is the finished result -

Do you love them as much as I did? I was worried that I would pick the gems off, but they actually stayed put for 3 days, and then only came off on one nail which I re-did. I wore this manicure for about 5 days before it chipped too much, and I got many compliments :) The striping tape was quite fiddly to place, and having to wait for each coat to dry completely meant that this manicure took nearly 3 hours to achieve, so won't be a regular occurrence! However, it was definitely worth it, and I look forward to using both striping tape and the gems a lot in the future :)

My next post will likely be an epic nail fail that occurred, since I called this blog my journey in nails, it seems only right that I show you the bad as well as the good - even if I did take this one off before it was even dried, I assure you, it's not pretty!

Mwah, S x