Earth-Toned Fishtail Nails

It’s day 12 of the 30 Day Nail Art Challenge and the theme is fishtail braid.  I’m psyched to finally get a chance to try out this nail art technique!  Since I’ve never tried fishtail before I practiced a little bit before jumping in.  The hard part was finding:

• opaque colors that only need one coat
• polishes that had a small(ish) applicator brush since pro-wide brushes didn’t seem to work well for this design
• last but not least, finding coordinating colors!

I used Top Coat It’s tutorial and I practiced with some different polishes until I got the technique down.  Most fishtail designs that I’ve seen use 3 colors and I chose the following:

Charming Charlie ♥ Penny Lane

Sephora by OPI ♥ I Think I Cayenne

Sephora by OPI ♥ S-Age is Just a Number

I also applied 2 topcoats at the end to try to smooth out the overlapping brushstrokes.  The surface still looked kinda uneven to me though.

I like the warm color combo, even though it feels kind of unseasonal for this time of year!  But I really wanted to incorporate my Charming Charlie polish (that’s the darkest shade in my photos).  I’m almost positive this shade is called Penny Lane, but I can’t confirm it since I lost the bottle.  I just used it 15 minutes ago so I have no idea where it could be hiding!  So have any of you been to a Charming Charlie retail store before?  I never heard of this chain until I stumbled upon one of their stores in Florida.  And I was like WOW!  It’s like a Claire’s Boutique for grown-up ladies!  It was jam-packed with affordable necklaces, accessories and even nail polish- so of course I had to buy one.  Penny Lane is a beautiful deep coppery shimmer and I hope you like it in my fishtail braid design!  You can see the other participants’ designs here.