Earth-Toned Fishtail Nails

fishtail_braid_nailsIt’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!

earth_toned_fishtail_nailsI 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.

brown_fishtail_nail_art

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.

Spring Gleam mani from Julep

spring_zig_zags

It’s day 8 and the theme of the 30 Day Nail Art Challenge is ZIG ZAG. That reminded me of an email I got from Julep last week about a simple zig zag spring tutorial.  When I saw it I made a mental note to try it out sometime.  Well that time is today!

I don’t own any Julep polishes so I had to improvise with what I had.  I used the following:

Sephora by OPIHow Cute Is That?

NYCSkyline Blue

Revlon Charming

Here’s Julep’s version↓  If you want to see their simple tutorial you can click their image below…

julep