French polka heart nails tutorial

Today's tutorial is a look perfect for the upcoming St. Valentine's Day, or for anyone feeling a little bit more classic or demure. We're gonna learn how to make almost perfect hearts with the least amount of effort, and a nice idea to elevate the look of our nail with not much effort with a polka dot pattern only on our free edge:

Please take into consideration that I don't own nail polishes in other colours that are not green, so that's why it's my choice as the background colour. Don't hesitate to change it for your favourite pink or red. Or feel adventurous, change the colours! Make your hearts brown because they're chocolates, go wild!

Let's review the items we're going to use for this look:

 I've used these two polishes:

• Wild & Young (previously known as Pinkduck) Acid Collection Nº343
• Wild & Young (previously known as Pinkduck) Sweet PWR Nº398

I also used a dotting tool and a small detailer brush, shown in the picture. Both are the key items to make the hearts that you want to. You want to start with your canvas being opaque:

For simplicity and clarity, I've chosen a plain background, but this technique for hearts is simple and effective so you can get a little more extreme with the backgrounds, as other tutorials that I've explained as gradients or marbles. First, you got to put two dots touching each other, trying to make them the same size. To do so, reload your dotting tool inbetween both dots. You can check a more detailed explanation in my Dotted chain nails tutorial if you want some pointers on how to make your dots as you want them:

 

 

 

As you can see, my dots are not perfect, but we can move on from here. Do the adjustments you feel like you have to do before proceeding with your next step. You don't want to be too slow with this step as you'd rather have these dots still workable for the next step. Also, the size of your heart will be determined by your dotting tool. Use a different size for different results!

 

What you want now is to take your detailer brush and more of the same polish, and try to draw a line diagonally from your dot below until the center, and the same from the other side. Don't load your brush too much, it's not necessary. This will create a nice outline for your heart. When you're happy with it, fill it in with the same polish and brush and... that's it! You have a heart!

 

 My heart was a bit on the big side for demonstrative purposes, as I used my biggest dotting tool. You can leave it here or add more hearts to your nail, as you desire. But I decided to go the extra mile and go for a cute polka dot design making a sort of frame for this nail. You can approach this any way you'd approach this kind of pattern, column-wise, row-wise or even making V-shapes. I'd go for the last one for the french line, to ensure it kind of mimics the smile line you want to achieve:

 

 You can tell I messed up my dots close to the heart and made them a bit bigger than intended, but pretend they're correctly sized. I used the other end of that particular dotting tool, which has a way smaller dot on it, to do the rest of the dots. I started with the dot under the heart, and then went from there. Estimate how many dots can you fit in your free edge, this might change depending on your nail shape. My swatch sticks feature a square free edge so I found like this approach let me estimate better. Once you have that ready, you can start going in V-shapes around, again, to ensure you're not going too much into your nail bed. 

 

The size of my heart made it so the illusion was a bit more rounded, and not a full on chevron. Smile lines resemble a parabolic shape, so in the center the variation is slower than in the edges, by the sidewalls. Depending on style, you can make the paraboles more pronounced, like in this case, or way less dramatic and more natural, up to your personal preferences and taste.

 

I'd recommend waiting for several minutes until the dots and heart have time to dry down to avoid smudging. As you can see in the shadow on the right side of the nail, the dots don't lay flat on the nail and that will mess your manicure up if you don't let it harden. Remember to float your top coat any time you're doing any kind of nail art too to reduce or eliminate smudging, too!

 

I hope you liked this nail art that is quite out of my comfort zone. I'm not one to add hearts to my real nails and I'm always missing St. Valentine's Day, but I thought that this blog had no excuse to not give an honest try to a look that could work for anyone wanting a different style than what I have for myself, and I think I achieved that goal. So tell me, will you give this technique a try? Do you know any other way to make perfect hearts? If you have any kind of question, please ask away and I will try my best to answer, and thanks for reading!