Glitterfied Nails

Yesterday got soooo busy, that I never got around to posting the resin casting tutorial. I will get on that ASAP, but I need to share this with you all! First, I should start with a confession... I have an obsession with glitter. Ryan makes fun of me for it a little, but I don't really care. I LOVE shiny things (I'm like a bird!) So this weekend, I was working on a project with glitter and decided I wanted to paint my nails. Well, out came the glitter! I mean, it was already right there, so it wasn't so hard to decide to use it. I also quickly decided that I wanted to do a french tip, so I grabbed the nail polish and started painting. At first, I grabbed a VERY bright pink to use as the base for the glitter, but after that was finished, I realized that the glitter doesn't coat SUPER well, so I redid them with clear polish. Here's the final product:

I swear they don't look anywhere near so orange-y in real life.

So, how did I do it? Well, I grabbed an old bottle of clear nail polish. I carefully painted the tips with the clear polish (if this isn't easy for you, there are tons of french tip guides you can buy or you can even use those things for your three hole punched paper!) After you paint each nail, add the glitter. Just dump it on. Do this over a plate or something that easily will catch the glitter so that you can recycle it. Now, WAIT for it to dry. I can't stress this enough. This is not a quick drying layer. After it's all dry, pull out your clear polish again (here's why you want it to be old) and coat the whole nail with clear polish. You very likely will get some of the glitter off of your nail and in to your nail polish bottle. You will also very likely get some in the rest of the nail (the part that only has clear polish on it). I would assume a good way of avoiding this would be to cover the glitter first without painting the rest of the nail, clean the brush and then finish the whole job. One other hint: due to lots of chemistry of the dye inside your glitter that I won't go in to (yea, I'm a chem nerd), the nail polish will very likely change the color of your glitter. Below is a picture of three different things of the same bright pink glitter. Obviously, the one on my nails is the one done with the nail polish, the one in the bottle is the loose glitter as I bought it from Michael's and the key is layered with two layers of gloss mod podge.

If you're worried about what it will look like, try the whole process on one finger before completing the rest. This stuff is hard to get off, but it's a seriously robust manicure. I've had it on for a while now and it's not even minorly chipping yet. It's pretty awesome.

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