Guest Week: Perfectly Polished

Hi! My name is Krystal, and I'm the author of the blog Perfectly Polished. Caitlin has so kindly allowed me to do a guest post, and asked that it included nail art. Well I'm not all that great at nail art, so I did my best. I decided to use my striping tape for the first time EVER, and I should say that some nails turned out better than others. I figured I'd post it even with the messed up nails, so you all could see what would happen if you tried it with not-so-dried nails. WARNING: Its not pretty.

So first off, I started off painting my nails the base color I needed them to be. With striping tape manis, you always want to put whatever color you want peeking through on the bottom. As with any manicure, make sure you start out with a base coat, and if you're like me, I always put a conditioner on my nails before any manicure. I use Revlon's Calcium Gel Nail Hardener to help build up my brittle nails from my acrylic days. Then I use OPI Start to Finish for my base coat.

Then, I used China Glaze Pool Party for the pink on my accent nail, and Color Club Almost Famous.

Next, and this is a very important step, MAKE SURE YOUR NAILS ARE COMPLETELY DRY. I personally suggest painting your nails the base colors, and then waiting a few hours at LEAST or doing this step the next day. I wouldn't suggest trying to do this mani in one, short sitting.

After you're 100000% sure your nails are dry, apply your striping tape. Since my pink polish dried extremely fast, I did that nail first. I applied the striping tape in whatever design I thought would look cute. You can use whatever design you'd like.

After the striping tape is all down, I painted over the pink with the yellow polish, causing the whole nail to look plain yellow. Make sure you get enough polish on your nail to cover the color underneath. If you're doing this mani with a light color and a dark color, my suggestion is to put the light polish on first.

Immediately after you'd reached desired coverage, remove the striping tape. You shouldn't wait until its all dry to remove the tape, because that will make it much more difficult to remove. MAKE SURE YOU REMEMBER WHICH STRIP YOU PUT DOWN FIRST! If possible, use different colors of tape, so you know which color went down first and last, that way you don't smudge your mani trying to pull up the wrong strip. It should look something like this if done properly.

Then, I did my other 4 nails. I used the same process, tape first, then polish.

Then I removed the tape. If you look close enough, you can see where my index finger wasn't dry, and neither was my pinky finger. So they're not nearly as neat as the others.

These are the nails that turned out as desired. I really like this mani, and the colors go really well together. I would definitely do this mani again, but I'd make sure ALL my nails are dry before putting the tape down.

Well, thats all for my guest post! I really hope you all love this mani as much as I do! I wanna give a big thank you to Caitlin for helping me get my name out there and I would love it if you'd all come by my blog and check it out! So thanks again for reading, and HAPPY POLISHING! <3