Seafoam Beach nails tutorial

This week's tutorial was a bit of a challenge for me, specifically because we're dealing with a really awful heat wave, so I didn't have any inspiration and honestly, I also didn't have any will to paint nails, because to preserve the integrity of the process, I try to not use my fan in that time. You can see where that's going. So I am giving you a tutorial of one of the places normal people escape to when it gets hot!

 

This technique is a variation of the nebula we did on our Holographic Space nails, which means our main tool will be a ripped make up sponge. The array of polishes I used is:

All of these polishes have been fairly inexpensive, ranging from 1 to 2€, so it's honestly not that expensive to get started into painting your nails at least in Spain:

• Note's Coastal Seaside
• Deliplus' Base Nº860
• PS' Barely There
• Essence's Sugar Touch

I will start with my ocean. I went for a seafoam green, as it's the most blue I'd personally wear, and put two coats to reach full opacity:

You can see that it bubbled a little bit close to the tip, it was the wind of the fan. Also that slight texture of the base of the nail is just seen in a macro lens, one layer of top coat would absolutely fix it. We're going to apply some nail polish close to the tip, adding a bit less in the middle of it. This is the foam:

It looks chaotic and ugly, but this is a nice reference of where do you want to place the next step. You want to take your sandy shade and paint around that thicker white. It will help a lot to apply a new layer of sponged white afterwards to create the wave crashing, and a couple of faint sponged lines:

 

You could marble on the water with any technique you prefer, but I wanted the thicker foam, even though in real life it's way less appealing, talking by experience. My last step would be smoothing it all out with a glossy top coat, and adding a matte top coat to the sand. In my particular case, I used Sugar Touch to also add visual texture. For what I gather, that polish is a matte top coat with iridescent shimmer of different colours in it, and it truly communicates the look in real life!

 Do feel free to tell me what you think of this nail art and if you are looking forward to any particular design or technique, and I'll see you next week!

Scaled Gradient nails tutorial

This week I felt quite uninspired so for this tutorial, I decided to get back into my gradient game to see if I still got it. I tend to ignore this technique mainly due to laziness, as I barely have liquid latex left, so this is a nice exercise for me.

 

Let's review how to do these. I wanted to play around formulas, and I noticed that Holo Taco's crushed holos gradient beautifully. I used:

 

This whole nail only uses two polishes:

• Holo Taco's Sugar Rush
• Holo Taco's Sour Note

I also used a make up sponge to apply my gradients. I started with Sugar Rush as my base colour, but honestly I could have used Sour Note if I wanted to. We have talked about all the effects that the base colour or lack thereof have on gradients, so we're not going back to that topic:

The key for this look compared to a regular gradient is making your gradient in the sponge quite narrow. You want to only cover a small fraction of your nail with it. After two coats of gradient, my result was:

 

It looks good enough if you just want a subtle variation instead of a full on gradient, but I want more. That picture already has a top coat and I let it drying for around 15 to 20 minutes. The day I did this nail it was quite hot, so I had a fan in the room, which could have decreased the drying time. And yes, I turned it off for nail painting and back on while waiting. It was dreadful.

You will want to place your nail vinyl in the place you want. If yours is skinny, like mine, you can use a further barrier for the next layer of gradient. I used scotch tape. If you plan on using a product like liquid latex, make sure it doesn't interact with your coats below and it will be easy to peel off. Don't ask about that swatch stick in my trash can.

 

You will notice that it looks like the gradient is basically covered by the vinyl, and that's what you want here. When you apply your gradient and you're satisfied, peel it off quickly and you will reveal your scale!

Don't pay attention to the small imperfections closer to the tip of my nail, I corrected them later on, and I blame humidity, heat and the fan. You can see that the white section kinda embraces the green, so the placement was correct. It's something you won't be able to know until you are done and peel it off, so if you mess up a few times, don't be hard on yourself!

Plan ahead your gradient widths, unlike me, because this gradient was a bit too wide, so it is awkward in the placement, in order to add a third gradient to this very nail. I did as a demostration:

 This is something I personally struggle with, but it's lack of practice. You can also opt for not using a gradient and putting a solid colour in between gradients, your nails are your oyster!

How did I decide to do this? Because this is what I wore for a family celebration last weekend, before getting quite sick! I am still wearing it, at the moment, because it has not chipped a bit! And yes I know this is a death flag for the manicure.

I reshaped my nails to be a bit more of an almond inspired shape instead of ovals, as my C-curve is personally too strong and makes my nails look like they're strongly growing downwards and not in a good way:

 

On my nails there have been a couple accidents with layering creating bumps that the top coat could not perfectly solve, so we live and we learn, but I hope you like my new shape! So far, I'm liking it a lot, it looks slender and elegant! And of course I could not leave you without a pic with flash:

 

I hope you like this technique and I will ask of you to keep me accountable and try more gradients on my nails, because I don't do them too poorly, considering the results! Let me know if you want more variations or other nail arts you want!

Neon Citrus nail tutorial

Today's tutorial is the awaited summer look I've been meaning to do for a couple of weeks already: we're going to do limes on our nails. You can do this nail art with different colours, like yellow for lemons and orange for... I don't need to continue that sentence, right? But I have green nail polishes, so I have limes:

  

It's a fairly easy free hand that only requires three polishes, two different shades of your preferred colour for the fruit and white! Mine are:

I don't expect you to find these exact polishes, as I found them in my local dollar store once, and the white was for a limited collection. Use what you have on hand:

• Yes Love 9 Days' #494
• Yes Love 9 Days' #508
• Deliplus' Base #860

Apart from that, a nail art brush will be required. We start with a the lighter shade to full opacity. That took two coats for me:

Now, let's build the citric. To do that, I start with white lines intersecting in a center point. For clarity, I do 4 lines in an asterisk, although I know citrics are not perfectly symmetrical:

 

Next step is drawing a circular shape with these inside. You can round a little bit the corners on the exterior part if you're a bit particular and neater with your lines. Mine are a bit on the thicker side because I'm still afraid of trimming nail art brushes, to be honest:
 

Right now, it looks like a random wheel inside my nail. The thing that will give it the final touch is the outside of the fruit, in the darker version of your colour. Bonus for neons: you're using it over white, so extra punchy result! Leave a white line around the design while painting your darker polish:

And that would be the final result of this tutorial! You can add as many as you want, or in different locations. I wanted to put it in the middle but leaving a thick french tip, I feel like in the photo, the differences between the two greens are not noticeable enough, but that's the neon part. Don't forget to apply a top coat to seal it in! 

Yes, I did take a pic of it with black light and it's fun yet disappointing? Again, the differences are not that great between the two greens, but the lights look really interesting:

I hope you enjoyed this and tell me which citric fruit you like the most! I don't really know what to do for next week but I'll come up with a plan!

Aromantic Pride Flag nails tutorial

I just realised it's June, which means that we can get a little bit quirky doing flags on our nails. I decided to go with a lesser represented flag for one very particular reason: It's green, white, grey and black, the only colours of nail polish I have. But this technique is perfectly suitable for basically any striped flag your queer or allied heart desires!

 

We're going to learn how to make decals today to get perfect stripes, or as perfect as you can cut them. Let's review the polishes I've used: 

 I used shades in my Holo Taco drawer that resembled the aromantic flag, which would be:

• Holo Taco's Green Screen
• Holo Taco's Here for the Payday
• Holo Taco's Not Milky White
• Holo Taco's Foreshadow
• Holo Taco's One Coat Black

I totally admit that Duct Tape Gray would be a better option than Foreshadow, that leans too warm, but guess what, I don't have it and I feel wasteful to buy a polish that I'll probably just use once!

Explanations aside, you will need a surface to paint on and peel off nail polish. I recommend using a flexible one, like a silicon mat or a plastic sealable bag. Flexibility is key to give you more wiggle room and ease working with this. Tweezers, manicure scissors and a clean up brush will be crucial too.

First off, let's look at your flag: you want to see how many stripes does it have to know which ones will become decals and which ones won't. For a five stripes flag, like this or the trans flag, I'd recommend doing two decals. Seven stripes flags, like the lesbian or gay man one, would get three decals. Three stripes, like bisexual or pansexual, will only need one! And for even numbers... trust your gut to know if you want to work on a decal in your cuticle area or free edge.

You want to paint the stripes you're going to turn into decals onto your surface. Paint them opaque and slightly on the thicker side, but don't exaggerate. You want them to be solid pieces when you peel them, but workable:

 

Those stripes are approximately the width of the brush of the bottles, as a reference. I placed the nail by it to ensure I wasn't getting too thin, but those were more than enough. Let these dry for around half an hour to an hour and try to peel them carefully by just twisting the material below carefully and seeing if a lip forms. That's your cue for the tweezers.

In the meantime, you can paint the other stripes of your nail, without too much care about a perfect line. Just be careful not to cross contaminate your polishes:

 

As you can see, my lines aren't straight at all, like me. It's fine, we're gonna cover them with the decals and that's the whole point.

When your decals are ready and peeled off, the next step is cutting stripes to size. Don't worry about the sidewalls, we're working on that later, the extra lips will give you wiggle room to place them for real. The polishes in my case were dried enough so I could place them on top without worrying about sticking them together to check the sizes and see if I needed to cut more. Don't apply pressure, as the soft material might want to do so anyways, but this is what I went for:

 

I'm happy with this, so I remove those stripes, apply a little amount of a sticky base coat to ensure adhesion and then place the stripes for real in their correct places. Sadly, that base coat I decided to use made my polishes wet again and they smudged in one side of the nail before me realising, so that's why I had to rush the job a bit and then play catch up. I'd recommend applying it with a drier brush and a very light touch. You don't need a full coat, you want the product there to just make the adhesion happen. Afterwards, you're going to cut those extra lips, either with scissors or, for safety, with an orange woodstick around your sidewalls and cuticle if applicable. This will leave a slightly jagged edge that you can take care of with a bit of acetone in your clean up brush. This will melt your polish and merge it with the layers that were applied from the bottle, while respecting the edge from the decal.

For full transparency, I skipped this clean up step as my tip is plastic and I don't want to risk melting of the plastic as an element to take into account. Also, being a tip, I could cut more precisely, because it doesn't have sidewalls. 

 You can notice the different layers, as the decals will be slightly raised, that's why you shouldn't do them too thick, but that's nothing a good top coat can't take care of. If it still annoys you to no end, you can double up on your top coat, or if you predict it will annoy you anyways, put a topper before the top coat to get that smoothing effect!

I have nothing else to say apart from wishing you the happiest of Prides in spite of what's going on around in the world, be safe but be unapologetically you. There are more ways to achieve a look like this, like straight nail vinyls or striping tape, but I thought this would be a great moment to introduce decals and cutting them in a straight line is the simplest thing you can do with them. Or is it? Next week probably we'll go for summer nail art. For real this time. 

What I wore in May 2025?

It's the beginning of the month, so let's revisit all the manicures that I've worn in the last weeks. This time I present you four, and as I promised, it's not all Holo Taco, though it will still be represented.

On May 3rd, I decided to go full on spooky, even if it was not the season, because it's a state of heart:

I got two polishes from Sally Hansen's collab with Beetlejuice, Bio Exorcist and Ghost with the Most, and that's my base. For the french tip, I used Holo Taco's Not Milky White and striped carefully with One Coat Black afterwards. And yes, this was the perfect excuse to use Holo Taco's Glow in the Dark Taco. It muddied a little bit the glitter, but I still got the effect I wanted, even if it wasn't perfect with the smudges.

On May 12th, I wanted to wear Holo Taco's Emerald City for the first time, as it was from the birthstone collection and it felt appropiate for the month, as I did with Ride or Diamond. To add a little bit of nail art, because I don't allow myself to have a plain manicure for some reason, free handed the lunulas with Holo Taco's World's First. Honestly I could and should have gone for the top coat and vinyl route, instead:
 

I wanted something softer, more pastel leaning for this next manicure, so on May 22nd my eye got caught by Sally Hansen's Under the Tree. Ironically, I feel this polish is more suited for spring than for Holidays? I understand the green plus golden shimmer is in theory very Christmas, but the execution gives me field of grass with small flowers. I used Astra's Crackle Lacquer in the shade L202. I honestly and truly NEED, capital letters, more crackle polishes. If I see some in Spain, I'll go feral. Companies, I'll throw euros at your face for green ones, and for honestly more than black.

 

Finally, on May 28th I did my last manicure of the month. I have talked in this blog a couple times about how my Holo Taco's Green Taffy bottle has issues, as it's not only almost empty, but it has had more thinner than it probably should have, meaning that it is not even a linear holo anymore, but it was more of a dusting of micro holograpic pigment in a jelly base. And I said to myself, okay, let's play with that and make a jelly sandwich with Holo Taco's Silver Flake Taco:

Honestly I love the result, and I'm sad I won't be able to replicate it anymore. I do have other flake polishes but this feels a bit different, anyways. I do have another unopened bottle of Green Taffy, so I'm not out, and I will do another experiment with the last drops of this bottle. It might be featured quite soon. I wish I could say the same about Holo Taco's Full Charge, but alas, Simply Nailogical betrayed me specifically.

Thanks for reading, I don't have a plan for my next manicures, so it will be a surprise to you as much as they will be to me! I had to reorganize my nail polish drawer to make it... drawers! Congratulations to myself to be in the "is this healthy" category of collection, specially noting that I don't buy other colours! I have nail mail coming, too, so I will be extremely overwhelmed, but excited!!
 

Geode nails tutorial

In today's tutorial, we're going to paint our nails in a way that resembles a geode, inspired by the fakemon that you saw two days ago. This look is way simpler to achieve than you'd expect!

 

I decided to make mine green because... honestly, do you need an explanation at this point? But you can make yours purples, reds, blues, soft hues to make an opal, the world is your geode! Kinda. This tutorial features the biggest amount of nail polishes I've ever used on one nail, so bear with me:

 

I said I wanted to give you tutorials with varied brands so, here you have it, in order of appearance:

• Pierre Cardin Mon Joli Vernis' Code: 14437
• Essie's Seize The Crown
• PS... Precious Jewels' Emerald
• Pull & Bear's Galactic Green
• Wild & Young (previously known as Pinkduck) Metallic is the new Black's Nº496 
• Essence's Dazzling Shell
• Deliplus' Manicura Francesa Blanco (French Manicure White)
• Deliplus' Nº997
• Kiko's 321

To achieve the effect, we're going to apply polishes skipping the center a little bit more, creating the bands of the geode effect. I personally prefer to go from dark to light, though it's not a definite order and you can put darker bands in the outside and lighter in the middle. Experiment!

 

This is two coats of Code 14437. Now, we're going to take a nail art brush and pick up our next shade and we're going to paint two lines creating an irregular opening in the middle. I personally paint the rest of the nail too, for ease later, though you can skip that step:

I will admit, Seize the Crown doesn't photograph that different from the first crème in that light, but I did the exact same process with Emerald, just making sure both of the other polishes were visible. This is why I prefer to overpaint outwards, that way I ensure I won't have a bald spot of a shade showing the previous or first one!

 I repeated this process for a total of five colours, ending in Nº496. I'd recommend playing with different visual textures. Metallics, shimmers, multichromes, holographics, they can all play a part in setting apart all your bands to create a multidimensional look!

To give it a bit extra of interest, I decided to put a layer of dazzling shell before finishing. It's an iridescent flake topper and I think it shows beautifully enhancing the effect. It's optional, as every step, but I personally think applying it before the finishing touches in the geode will help the effect, so think before finishing up the last layers:

My last steps would be adding a white cast and then the brown (or grey, or the shade you want your stone to be) to make it look encapsulated. I applied a coat of the white crème and then the holographic semi-sheer polish to make my white:

 

This way, my flakes are below the layer of whites, helping with the dimension of the manicure. Our last layer before top coat would be the brown. I'd try to make the white stripe thinner than the rest, as the contrast is enough to make it pop and making it the same width could detract from the effect:

 And this would be the final result, before top coat. Let each layer rest, before applying the top coat to avoid smudging, very important specially in a design like this! A very last suggestion would be applying a matte, or textured top coat on the stone. You can also use some sort of visually (or actually!) textured brown to make it look more natural, too!

This is how I crafted my geode design, more in line with the shiny version of my fakemon than the original one, but you know me, I can't stop with the greens and I don't even own purple nail polishes! Please feel free to experiment with this technique and your favourite stones! Next week I think I'm going to cave in to a more summery design, as the heat in my area is starting to get too unbearable to resist! Thanks for reading!