Kiwi splash nails tutorial

Excuse the lack of tutorials for last week but I got too absorbed into other projects. This week has been no different but I could salvage some minutes to paint a nail and write this text! I went with another summer fruit inspiration for nails. I don't know if you remember the deep lore of me doing a kiwi nail set last year on stream, but this year I went for a simpler version that I can show you:

 

I know it looks messy specially in the center, but that's the top coat's fault. Trust me, you'll see. For now, it's see what do you need to create this kiwi:

 

The polishes I'm using are mostly Sally Hansen. I would have used the white of the collection if I had it available, honestly, but I just didn't:

• Wild & Young (previously known as Pinkduck) Sweet PWR #398
• Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Pride 772 Thorn This Way
• Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Pride 768 It's Giving

Again, I would probably have used the white of this collection if I had it with me, but I am not someone with huge nail polish budget so I have to restrain myself and go only for the greens with few exceptions. I paint my nails green anyways! Let's start painting our white base. Don't worry too much about making it a flawless even coat, because we're going to do gradients on top, we just want something to help up with the coverage:

 

 Next up, the promised gradient. We're going to go for what it's called lately an aura style gradient, or previously a radial gradient. We want a colour in the middle and another in the outskirts of the nail, basically. You can achieve this several ways: either painting your gradient on your sponge as usual and just rotating it or painting it directly on your sponge. I did the latter with a sponge that was basically the same size as this swatch stick:

 

 

Carefully, build up your gradient to opacity. Don't expect to glop on product on your nail and make it look good. It won't. Thin layers and persistence is key. This style of gradients is harder due to the border between colours being in so many different places around the nail that it's impossible to fix a corner without messing up another so be patient and trust the process, you've got this:

 

This is probably not the best gradient ever. But we're going to cover up the mess with the kiwi's seeds, because we're good at solving issues. Use a dotting tool with your black polish and ever so slightly drag the dot to make it not a perfect circle. You want it to seem like it points towards the center of the nail, as that's the pattern kiwi seeds come naturally. Do a circle around the kiwi in the intersection between the green and white, tightly packed together but not so tight that there's no space inbetween:

 

 

Notice that the result is very uneven, but a top coat will resolve that. I wanted to demonstrate it with a bottle of my previous favourite top coat, but they changed the formula so much that I don't use it in my manicures anymore. And it showed exactly why! See, when I applied the top coat to this nail, after cautionary minutes and floating the brush to avoid smearing the dots, this happened:

It did two distinct things: It clumped up in the middle creating some sort of top coat rock floating on my nail that I couldn't get rid of, hence the crater, and it became matte. Why? I don't really know but my best bet is that it's due to the humidity in my area. And I'm sorry but I can't get rid of it magically, I live in a humid area and that's how it is! I think this looks cute matte too, hence why I'm showing to you.

Also, if that happens to you, my solution is using an old nail oil brush, it only needs a very small residue of it, and very very slightly paint over the matte nail. This is my result:

I'm writing this an hour after the fact and the shine hasn't reduced at all. The nail polish is dry though it's not as quick dry as this product initially is, so I'd suggest not repurchasing and looking for recomendations of other top coats.

I apologize for the lack of tutorial last week, but the heat wave wearing off and family coming to town made it very difficult to balance everything out and this week, it was the nail art the one that got culled. I don't really have more plans for nail arts until the spooky season, so expect a bit of random things in the meantime! 

Fakemon Friday: Achooni, the Fluff Pokémon

Never ask a woman her weight, a man his salary and Yuraite how long did it take to make a new fakemon. But the zero viewers interested in this, I'm back with a new line!

These two are probably the combination of many bad choices one after another, so get ready for this wild ride that Achooni and Achuuni are!

This whole idea started because I wanted to make a dust bunny. Literally. For an evolution, I wanted to go for something that wasn't a big dust bunny, so instead, I went for a cryptid lagomorph, to justify the Fairy type, so I went for a very loose Jackalope. But that felt a bit flat, so I wanted to move the concept forward, I didn't know what kind of personalities I wanted. The first form was clearly going to be cheerful and active, but for the evolution, everything was up in the air.

And then, in June, I was quite sick, and in the worst day of it, I just had an epiphany: the names. Achooni felt natural, playing with an onomatopeia and the common mispell of the world bunny. And spelling it different... Achuuni. A chuuni. Chuunibyou, or the syndrome of eighth grade, those characters that are so over the top in their antics and mannerisms. It came together.

Achooni was quite fun to render, trying to make the fluffy part distinct from the ears even though they're the same colour, and Achuuni gave me trouble. The initial pose was more dramatic but the render wasn't turning out okay at all.  Then I had to start over and do a simpler pose and scale from it. To give it a bit of extra visual elements, I decided to get inspiration from subcultures of the late 2000s, just because they are familiar to me. So the piece on the hips, that I wanted to keep the horns colour around the rest of the body, is inspired by the way scene fashion wore two sets of belts crossed, the chest puff is reminescent of the handkerchiefs that in the era had every alt kid on a chokehold and bracelets galore to tie the fluff and the yellow. I don't even think it translates that well without the explanation, but that could be something to keep in mind for other creatures and iterations.

Palette wise, I wanted a light brown and then a pink for Achooni, to make it explicitly darker and more purple in the evolution. A tarnished yellow felt correct for the horns so I added that to it. Shinies, honestly I was just thinking "this in pink would be a very cute cotton candy", which was a concern if I wanted to not make it dust brown, I don't want confusion with the Edible type, but in a shiny I decided to relax it and let the trans community have their pink, blue and white icon. Achuuni's shiny was decided basically based on Achooni's. If the dust turns pink, I should turn dust into something in that family, and a desaturated red seemed appropiate. For the blue, I shifted it towards a teal. Those kind of shades give me necromancy vibes so I felt it was good for it.

Now that I'm looking back to back at Maretal I feel like the shiny was lazy and predictable, as both lines have similar tones, but I guess this only means that I should go for something of a different colour next!

I picture this line as being annoyers. The high speed and the abilities are meant for it to be able to drop some chip damage and status, though again, I'm not a competitive player so probably everything needs readjusting here and there. These are more about the vibes. Environment-wise, I find them fit into more of abandoned urban areas, destroyed and old buildings where dust clumps up and alternative teens go for the aesthetics, so in that regard it also works together.

And now, it's time to show you the reason these posts take so long: I don't only do front sprite with the shinies, but I animate them manually and do the back and icons! Thanks so much for reading and watching my creatures, I hope next one comes faster. Which one will be? I still don't know!

 

 

 

 

 

Fish Lure nails tutorial

Today, I will arrive late to a nail trend that I haven't seen on anyone that wasn't talking about it being a trend already, so, is this a trend or just a post taken too seriously? In any case, the result is so good and fun I feel like I have to show you:

 So, for this result, you could say all the steps are optional, as you don't really need a vertical gradient, nor the lines, nor the dots being concentrical, nor the gills. But I went specially extra to show you. In fact, it was so extra that I used seven different polishes, with six different formulas:

 

Lures are quite shiny and interesting in texture and I wanted to recreate that with my polishes. The shinier the better:

• Holo Taco's Oat Couture
• Holo Taco's Peridon't Bother me
• Holo Taco's Missed Shift
• Holo Taco's Ivy League
• Holo Taco's Frozen Benanas
• Holo Taco's Not Milky White
• Holo Taco's One Coat Black

I started with Oat Couture. I wanted to do the weirdest gradient I've ever tried, different formulas and completely opposite colours, to give it that effect of a top and a bottom side, and you know I was going to pick green, so nude it is:

 Usually, gradients are done from cuticle to free edge, but I decided to make it vertically, so one half of the nail is this nude holographic and the other would be green. Think that these colours and formulas won't mix well, so I took whatever started to look good in my gradient and moved on:

I accept the muddy middle colour as even something good, honestly. Again, this step is optional but in the "bottom" side of the nail I wanted to draw three curved lines as some designs have, potentially emulating the parts on a lure to move around in the water and actually serve their purpose, but I'm not a fishing person, don't ask me about that. I went for my multichrome for this:

Finally, time to add the eye, and other dots now that we are at it. I did a bigger circle with a dotting tool with white, and the rest of the dots in the other half of the body with a dark green shimmer. Try to keep variation between these dots and give them ample time to dry to the touch:

My last step before top coat was adding another colour accent, with my gold this time. I put smaller dots around the big ones and in the centers of the biggest ones, to add dimension to the design. I also added a small black dot to the eye just to make it look like an eye.

My last touch was adding a curved moon shape for the gills by the eye. And after this, wait for at least 10 minutes, ensure everything is dry to the touch and float your top coat. Dotticures are probably the biggest offenders for smearing, and I don't want you to mess it up by accident in this last step. The top coat will smooth out your surface and give better depth to the pigments like the holo to shine properly.

And this is this week's tutorial, I don't know what will happen next week as the heat here is not getting any milder. Apparently, the heat wave we were going to be under for 4 days became a 7 days wave, then 10... and the last reports say that we still have 4 more days for a total of two weeks. Who knows anymore? Maybe next week's tutorial is melted! Thanks for reading! 

What I wore on July 2025?

 I already told you what happened, so I won't hide it: I broke one of my nails. I won't show pictures of it in this post, but it was a very bad break on one side of the middle nail on my right hand. I patched it for the wedding I had on the 12th, and kept it for a bit to let it grow.

So this month I decided to not do complicated nail art just to ensure that if the patch fails, I could easily repaint the same thing, and that's what I did. Believe me, that nail was repatched and redone easily 5 times, but the first time I painted these nails was July 1st, just changing the month:

I am using Essie's Snow White collab, specifically the shades Seize the Crown as the background and Good Things Glow for the outline. If you're wondering, that's my left hand, which stood unbothered until I removed this manicure. The right hand had more fixes than I'm willing to admit until it finally broke off on the middle and I built a repair on top.

That held great, and it allowed me to do my Wedding nails for that event. I painted these the night prior to the event, on July 12th!

I knew these were the last nails I was going to wear with this length and shape, so I held onto them as much as I could while they still looked good. And good they looked up until I changed them on July 22nd. I shortened them, after checking that the break was above my hyponichium and I was not risking pain, and stood there, filing while crying on the inside. To cheer me up, I just went with neon green:

 

You can tell that I was so done that I just didn't care about the lumps I was putting on my nails at that point. I just needed this manicure to be done and forget about this traumatic filing experience. The polishes I used... I mixed them myself on stream, actually! These are the neon green topped with the glow in the dark green topper I made in this video! 

 

 

As you can tell, I probably didn't mix the neon well enough and there's a couple of clumped pigment, but better shaking should resolve the issue and the formula is really good after that. I'm impressed at the result and I might go for this, I still have much (like... 2 grams?) neon green pigment laying around so I have enough to last me... at least three years. For a normal person, a lifetime, but neon green is probably my default.

 

The glow in the dark doesn't integrate that well, sadly. The glowing pigment sinks and traps the mixing balls, to the point that I need to insert a tool to start manually shaking it and integrating it into the formula, and it needs vigorous shaking between each nail to avoid pigment sinking, but after those estipulations, it worked great. It even glowed when not charged with black light so I'd consider it a victory for me!

 

The poorly executed painting job bothered me, so I changed these on July 28th. I notice that in this short length, even wrapping my tips, I have lots and lots of chipping on my tips, anyways, so I went for something I've never done before: a skittle manicure. I wanted five polishes that were the same colour but had different finishes, and I landed on:

 

These are Holo Taco, with one exception being my thumb, which I mixed myself with Holo Tacos, so it technically counts. Let's go from pinky to thumb then:

 

On my pinky I'm wearing Green Screen.

On my ring finger I'm wearing Everything is Pine.

On my middle finger I'm wearing Foiled Again, and I can tell you that yes, all my frosted metals have had issues with the stability of the formula. Mine is more yellow leaning than the original. And I don't dislike it whatsoever, don't get me wrong, but this formula is the least stable I've had in a nail polish ever, this bottle is from this last Black Friday and was opened for the first time to swatch it on March!

On my pointer I'm wearing Green Taffy.

And finally, my thumb is sporting a mix of Lite Link with a couple of drops of overthinned Green Taffy, my previous bottle of it. The proportions are not exact but in my mixing video you can see that mix too, the amount of green into Lite Link barely affected it aside from shifting the base colour from blue to a green. And I'm obsessed with this mix.

 

As per the writing of this post, I'm still wearing these nails. Expect shorties for August because it's what I have, and thanks for reading! I have many polishes I want to use this month but will I have the nails to do so? 

Melting Ice Cream nails tutorial

Today we're going to work on nails that look like ice cream. I think this particular iteration could look amazing on pointed nails, so something along the lines of an almond or an stiletto, to give it the full shape of an ice cream cone, but it is readable anyways:

 

This might have been partially inspired by AiScReam's single, but if you are into any kind of japanese music, you might have heard the audio I'm referring to. Mint chocolate is not my top 1 flavour but it is green and you know the rules in this blog. Let's see what do you need for this:

My three polishes are really inexpensive drugstore ones, you will need three base shades: a tan to make the cone, a darker shade to make the cross pattern of it, and then, your favourite flavour! Or you can make a skittle of different flavours on each nail, that would look really cute. My polishes are exactly:

• PS... Gel Effect 's Barely There
• Kiko's 321
• Deliplus Gel Effect' Nº137

Let's start with the foundation of your ice cream, the cone that will hold it: paint your tan to opacity, it took me two coats as the first one was a bit uneven:

Then here's where the magic begins. Grab a striping brush and start painting lines with your darker brown. You want to make parallel lines in a diagonal direction, but don't sweat it too much if they're not perfect. After that, do them in the opposite diagonal direction, to get a crossed pattern. You don't need to reach the top of the nail, you can stop at the height your cone is gone to be, you do want ice cream after all. To top it off, you can do a thicker line across your nail with that shade. This line doesn't have to be perfect at all, as you're gonna cover parts of it with your melting ice cream:

Time to add your favourite flavour. I will fill the space above with my mint colour. With help of a small brush, I will also extend drops below that line we established to make the melting part. If you need to add more coats, feel free to do so until you reach an opaque result. Don't be afraid of going further down if you want a truly melted look, or barely touch the first line for a recently served ice cream, to your taste:

 

And this is basically the whole technique. Depending on your kind of ice cream, you might want to add more details or not. A vanilla ice cream might be just a pastel yellow but if you want to go for a neapolitan ice cream you can just play around with your three colours and drops. Straciatella or cookies and cream can replicate the effect with flakies. Or you can add small red dots on your pink strawberry ice cream if you want a more "natural ice cream" look instead of a fully processed plain look! I added brown irregular shapes of the darker brown using a small brush because it's chocolate mint, not just mint:

 

Wait for your coats to dry before applying a top coat or your treat will smear beyond recognition and edibility, and that's it! Today seems to be the first day of a heat wave where I live, another one, yes, so you can bet I had an ice cream after this tutorial. That's also why my linework was worse than usual, I could not turn off the fan while doing that so my polish clumped way faster. But the ice cream is not about being perfect for instagram, but about it being delicious, and I think I achieved this.

I hope you put many flavours and try toppers and techniques to make it your own! Do you have any fav ice cream? I said chocolate mint is not my actual fave, that title would go to turrón. It's a nutty Christmas treat typical of Spain but you can find things with its flavour a bit more year round. And the temperature and texture of ice cream makes me appreciate it even more, I can't have enough!