Flake Gradient nails tutorial

This week I had another social event, yes, another wedding, so I will show you a very very easy technique you can use at any fancy event that allows some extra sparkles. This time, you will need no special tools, even! We're doing a gradient, but with flakes, and I'll show you two!

Do not pay attention to the fact that my swatch sticks have a chipped corner. A couple of them came with this and... oh well, let's do them together, shall we? I mean, it's still a functional surface!

 

For this you will need two polishes, the base and the flakes. Easy enough, right? You can use a full coverage flakey bomb polish, which is what I used, or a flake topper. In this case, you'll probably need a sponge to really load up one end of the gradient, I can try that for another tutorial, but in this case, I went for full coverage because come on, I needed quick and easy nails that I could retouch just in case!

 

 I used these two pairs of polishes:

 

• Holo Taco's Mint Mojito
• Holo Taco's Mint Money
• Holo Taco's Green Taffy
• Holo Taco's Foiled Again

I'll address the elephant in the room, yes my frosted metals (all of them) are slightly tarnished, they're still usable even though the colour is slightly different. I have no proof or tests done but my assumption is that something in the frosted metals react with specifically the pigment in the brush of the bottle, because they are actually discoloured, and that is transfering to the base of the polish, making it slightly thinner and having a hint of a sepia hue.

 

In any case, time to apply your base to opacity. I used linear holos to just mask sparkle with sparkle in case things went off the hook, but you can use a crème if you so desire:

 

Probably one coat would have done the trick if I went slightly thicker, but I noticed slight bald spots. Well, now the technique. You want to grab a small amount of polish and put your flakes slightly heavy on the base, like a normal to thick coat, not a blob (or tip, depends on what look you're going for!) and then do very slight flicks through the nail. You can stop before the end of the nail. That way, your flakes will feel opaque or almost and they will fade to nothing, showing your base (in my case, the holo) below.

 

 

I stopped close to the tip, but you can do a second coat to intensify the effect or make the flakes reach the end of the nail. It's absolute personal preference. I did a second coat reaching the end of the nail with very few flakes and that's the effect I went with:

 

 

I wore the mint version for a wedding I had because honestly, it was a hot day and the mint shirt I have is more breathable yet still appropiate, but I stacked more things on top because I'm extra and I can't stop won't stop:

 

If you're curious, I layered Holo Taco's Everything Taco on top because that's like my party topper that I wear for any big celebration, and then a coat of Holo Taco's Reflective Taco because, as I said, can't stop won't stop. Hey, it's a very subtle effect but I knew it was there and saw it, hence mission accomplished.

Anyways, thanks for reading, I will see you next week with another easy tutorial. I will most likely stream it on twitch next Wednesday, be on the look for my stream schedule! 

Jelly Potion Sandwich nails tutorial

Do you know what I realised? We haven't done any jelly sandwiches as tutorials and we're going to change that today. Let's play with layers!

This is truly the simplest of techniques, as you will only need two polishes. They have to be of a specific formula but it will be fine, I swear:

 

The polishes you will need are a jelly and a topper. A jelly is a translucent polish, intentionally sheer. And a topper is a polish that you want to put on top of your manicure to add effects like flakes, shimmers or glitters. I'll explain as we go what the effect is, for now, mine are:

• Mixture I did of a couple drops of green polish into a bottle of transparent polish, not top coat
• Deliplus' Duo Nº900 (only the white glitters part)

I know this is probably the less helpful list of products so far, as I made my own mix with a bit of green polish and that duo polish has been discontinued for a decade or so, and it's 3 mL bottles. I used almost all of it for a manicure, sample size can't even describe it!

Our first step will be painting a coat of our jelly, so it's transparent on purpose. If you use it on natural nails, you are meant to see your nail line!

Next step, paint a coat of your topper on top! Mine has small white hexagonal glitters and a golden shimmer throughout. I kinda want more white glitters or flakes, they're fun...

And to complete the sandwich, you need to add another layer of jelly. Again, its transparency will allow the topper to show through but with the hue of the jelly you're using, adding a lot of dimensionality to your manicure and making it look like it came out like that straight out of the bottle. Also, a second coat of the jelly will help a lot with coverage and saturation.

In camera it's very shy but in person I could see more of the glitters. But if you don't like this, you can keep going! Add another layer of topper to get a more dense topper effect:

 And of course, you can add a final coat of jelly if you want to encase this one too!

 The different layers of topper and jelly will create a lot of visual interest on your nails no matter what look you end up going for, if the simple sandwich, topped or double sandwich, so it's a case by case basis depending on how the polishes play together and your personal preference. I am wearing this exact manicure topped, but when I did it, my topper was extremely thickened by time and I decided against thinning it for consistency between my nails. A bad decision, but a decision nonetheless:

That's why my glitter looks so dense. Because it is, it was lacking base. It also makes my manicure to feel thick. Also fun fact that I didn't realise when I made this jelly a couple years ago! I did it with a cheap Pinkduck polish in shade 11, a totally medium green, the green you think when you think of green. That pigment, for some reason, reacts to black light:

 My plan was for the glitters to look like bubbles, preliminarly, but it didn't translate great so it doesn't really look like a potion, but I'll pretend like it does and move on, y'know? So, hey, nail polish companies, if you want to collab with me, we can work on a jelly with glitters... and, oh, yeah, thanks for reading! See you next week, I hope, with another elegant set because I have another wedding to attend to and I don't know if I should repeat mani. Even though I'm repeating outfit. lol the hypocrisy.

School Blackboard nails tutorial

It's back to school season so I thought it would be an appropiate time to show you something green that's part of my childhood. I don't know if these are normal nowadays, as apparently we have shifted towards more whiteboard oriented education centers, at least my uni had all whiteboards with markers, but in school and high school we had these dark green blackboards in which we scribbled with chalk!

Achieving this look is surprisingly easy and I can give you a fun trick at the end! But first, let's review which products I used:

This blackboard effect is all about crèmes but you can customize your blackboard however you want with a more textured look for the wall or a metallic polish for the rim of the blackboard:

• Holo Taco's Head Hunter
• Holo Taco's Brownie Points
• Holo Taco's Magical Mustache
• Holo Taco's Not Milky White

 Feel free to replace at will, but you do want a dark green polish and build it to opacity:

Then, it's time to paint a straight line french with your "wall" colour. Mine is a dark brown but feel free to put something lighter or a visually busy polish to emulate stone walls, whatever reminds you of your childhood or speaks to your personal palette. Don't worry about it being perfect, we're gonna refine it with the next step altogether. I didn't use any nail art tools for this, straight out of the bottle:

Next step will be creating the border of the blackboard, where the chalk rests. And this is the step in which we're going to clean that line. Use a striping brush to create a line between these two shades. It's that simple as a concept:

Pro tip, don't let a hair from your dog enter that line. It will be cleaner. Anyways, this is basically your base and the whole effect. To drive the point home, I used my white to create a small piece of chalk resting over the border and I painted a molecule! Extra points if you know which one it is! But nobody is an organic chemist like me, anyways:

 Okay, I'll give you the answer: It's menthol! Why menthol? Because I'm drinking a lot of chocolate mint black tea lately and it's a small and simple enough molecule to allow me to draw it with my lack of fine line skills. Seal your manicure with a top coat, and then make it matte. Trust me.

I skipped the quick dry top coat here so my surface is not perfectly smooth. I did it because it's a swatch stick, honestly, simple as that. It's not attached to skin so oil won't build up and won't be used for things in life like your real hands will be, so it won't dent.

The fun fact that I teased earlier is that when this matte top coat is dry... you CAN paint over it with gel pens to make it full on back to school nails! You can make similar nails with a white background and use all your glitter and neon gel pens as your heart desires! But in this blog, it has to be green. Would you be interested in another tutorial seeing the same effect with different colours? Let me know and thanks for reading! 

What I wore on August 2025?

I know my tutorials have taken a hit lately, but that doesn't mean I don't paint my nails. The heat and real life circumstances made me have no time nor inspiration so please excuse me with these four manicures I did all over August. Spoiler alert, they're from Holo Taco. I'm not sponsored. But I should be.

First manicure of the month was on August 6th, in which I wanted something simple and darker but I didn't have much time so I went for the most basic trick of the book: add a topper and call it a day:

Multichromes with linear holo make my brain happy because it always has something to do in different lights, so that's what I tried here!

The polishes are Holo Taco's Chameleon Coat and Holo Taco's Linear Holo Taco. Fun fact, FOMO added a second bottle of Chameleon Coat to my cart when it was getting discontinued and I realised I don't wear multichromes often enough because that first bottle is still not empty, so this was an attempt to let that happen! Don't get me wrong, I like it a lot, it's just that I can't fit it in nail art, most of the time!

Then I had another betrayal. My thumb nail broke. Yes, another nail break. I swear I'm cursed. I did what I could to save this, and honestly, I think I served. I could round the shape of my nails without sacrificing length and one of the things I do when I reshape my nails is getting a simpler manicure, just to test the waters. So, on August 11th I did this:

This is Holo Taco's Peridon't Bother Me with some AliExpress stickers. I learnt from my last attempt with these stickers that top coat just flakes off of them, so I place them over my top coat firmly, but they weren't able to stay in position, so further experimentation will be required. The issue is that I kind of don't want to place stickers on my nails to just be a bad manicure, so let's see when do I do that. The combination is amazing, honestly. Peridon't Bother Me with some black just speaks to my heart, but I don't think I can freehand with black on top of it. It's just too much.

I had a family reunion on August 16th, and they already saw my nails on the 15th, so to assert dominance as the nail guy in my family, I had to change my nails, you know. Also, they didn't go well with my outfit. I wanted to go for some sort of mint-chocolate ice cream look with layers but the plan got derailed halfway through and I ended up with these:

 

The polishes are Holo Taco's Mint Mojito topped with Holo Taco's Black Flake Taco and then Holo Taco's Reflective Taco. Originally I was thinking of making this manicure matte, believe it or not: The velvet visual texture you achieve with matte linear holos is exquisite, and the reflective glitter still twinkles a bit under the matte top coat, so I thought it would give it the look of ice cream on my nails. But I just liked the results in glossy too much to dare and mess it up. I'm a coward.

 

My last manicure of the month is what I'm still wearing, though it will be changed soon. I was starting to get bothered with myself with my lack of actual nail art, so I just did these on August 25th:

 

This is a gradient between Holo Taco's Not Pressed and Holo Taco's Born Ugly. Those two olive murky greens spoke to my soul and they look amazingly together, and I love green in all versions. Topping it is Holo Taco's Lunar Unicorn Skin, which I got because of the green shift and it being warm toned, while Galactic Unicorn Skin's green reads more apt for cool toned greens to me. I don't know, my brain works like that, it's only a problem if I let it become one, in the meantime, shinies.

And those are the manicures I have done this month. For next month, I'd love to force myself to not rely that much on my Holo Taco drawer but I don't know how feasible will that be! Let's see together!