Scalloped clouds nails tutorial

This week's tutorial is, for the first time, a look that can be achieved without any kind of tools! You will only need the brushes that come in the bottles of nail polish! We're gonna paint scalloped waves, or clouds, or really whatever it inspires you with different colours. My personal choice was to make it like this:

 

As you can see, this nail has three different areas. The cuticle area is a darker emerald green, then we have a stripe of gold and the free edge has a more desaturated green with bigger flakes. This is highly customizable. You can do each stripe as wide as you want and as narrow as you have the ability to do so! Let's see specifically which polishes I used, I can tell you they were fairly unexpensive:

Again, I'm using three polishes from the same brand. It's fairly comfortable to pick from the same brand though I probably should use more varied polishes. I don't want you to feel overwhelmed with having to find the exact same ones and that's why I tend to not mix too many brands. Tell me what you think of this! The polishes are:

• Wild & Young (previously known as Pinkduck) Glint Collection Nº331
• Wild & Young (previously known as Pinkduck) Moon Light Nº416
• Wild & Young (previously known as Pinkduck) Metallic is the new Black Nº500

A characteristic that these three polishes have, and that I recommend yours to have, is that they are quite opaque. Mine are almost one coaters, but with a slightly thicker coat and careful application, these three can be decent enough. My gold in particular was a bit more streaky and difficult to reach to opacity, but it was still possible.

I swear this is super easy to achieve, so let's start with the step by step:

The first step is painting your nail with the colour you prefer. As I stated earlier, this was one coat, even though it required a bit of a careful application. Let it dry enough until the point to be able to apply a second coat, but this time, we're gonna do it differently:

Here you can say why my gold was not the best for this particular purpose, as it showed a bit of brush strokes. How did I apply it? Easy: instead of trying to cover my nail with my strokes, I just started applying it at a random height on my nail that I wanted, and swiped down. Repeated a couple more times at different heights. I will admit, I fiddled a bit with my brush to perfect the shapes as I wanted them but I didn't use any additional tools. Practice the pressure of your brush to get the desired arch and look. It will depend on the brush that your particular polish has. These polishes in particular have a round brush, even though my preference is flat wide, but honestly it might have played to my advantage in particular, as it didn't get that wide of a scallop!

You can leave the look there with a blue background and a white cloud, for example, or go the extra mile: doing it again! And with this, you can decide to do a different pattern, do a more even distribution of the polishes... I personally decided to be adventurous and try to replicate the shape leaving a thin golden strip. I will admit this is less forgiving than other configurations, so if you don't feel confident, try out one of the other options I've suggested!

Personally I think this combination called for this combination as the two greens are very close in hue so the thin strip gave it an element of interest and separation.

In my experience, I used opaque enough polishes that I only needed one coat, a swipe with a bit more polish of the usual, but of course you can try to go for sheer polishes and play with layers. I don't know if you would be interested in me trying to do the same techniques that I've already done with different polishes and providing diverse results, explaining why?

Anyways, the inspiration here? Actually... I have to share terrible news. I broke a nail and I couldn't save it, so I had to file the down. And I've decided that this year I would NOT settle down for a basic manicure. But also I'm getting nail mail too! By the point this post is published, it will be in my hands... and I'll fight to not have it on my nails! So I needed something easy, visually effective...

And I did this exact look! Then, I decided it looked nice, so that's why it's this week's tutorial! For that reason, we have a couple of extra photos, so let me show you as an extra, a picture of this same hand with flash, to show the differences in the formulas:

 

That's it for this week's post, I truly hope you do enjoy it and this post has a third question that you can comment, if you'd like to read a tutorial for any nail look I've published in posts like What I wore on January 2025 please feel free to contact me and let me know! Sometimes, analysis paralysis makes difficult to know exactly what to do in a tutorial, I want to deliver looks that you'll like! Thanks for reading and see you all in the next one, which might probably be a flashier one.