Sailor manicure

Morning my fellow nail polish addicts, as promised here is my sailor inspired manicure using my goodies from my Meebox. In my previous post I reviewed Septembers Meebox, review can be found here.

So here is a sort of tutorial on how I created these nautical nails, I must admit this is my first time doing nail art that isn't stamped so they are not the best but I'm pretty pleased. I will definitely be using different methods in the future as I really enjoyed the freedom of creating my own design instead of using a stamping plate so watch out for those.

First thing I started with was choosing my accent nail, I decided to go with one of the nail wraps i received in my Meebox. I thought it might be a bit fiddly but I found it so easy to apply to the nail, first I put on my Nailtiques formula 2 base coat which i use before every manicure. Just a small FYI about the Nailtiques it is fantastic, in my very first post I did a full review on this nail strengthening system that can be found here. My nails have never looked healthier and they are finally beginning to grow (yay).

Oops back to the subject at hand forgive my random rambling it happens from time to time which you probably have noticed. Anyway the ncla nail wraps were fantastic, after my base coat had dried I picked the design I wanted for my accent nail and made sure that the wrap would fit. Once I had taken the wrap off the sheet I lined the curved end up with my cuticle and pressed down. I smoothed the wrap around the edges and made sure no bubbles had been caught underneath. Once that was done I used the file provided to take off the excess added my top coat trusty Seche Vite and was good to go.

Next I used Cassella limitless as my base colour for the rest of my fingers, this is a beautiful white cream opaque in 2 coats.  I really like the formula for this polish and hope to be trying more from this brand in the future.

I also said I would see if Limitless would stamp, and I am happy to say it does and comes out quite clearly too.

After adding top coat to the rest of my fingers I waited at least 10 minutes to make sure that the nail-mail straight stencils wouldn't pull up my white base. 

Once those had been applied I reached for the Navy blue Nailsinc gel effect polish I had received and painted that over top, whilst the polish was still wet I pulled up my stencils and tried to get as crisp a line as possible. I did find some of them leaked a small bit so on some fingers I have little streaks of light blue, it's not highly noticeable and something I'm sure would improve with practise. All that was left was to clean up, as I said in my review I would let you know whether old Burlington street stained and whilst cleaning up I did find I had a small bit of smurf fingers going on so I'm going to say it probably does. 

So here is the finished product, seen as it was my first time using quite a few of these methods I'm quite happy with the finished product. Hopefully the more I use nail stencils and nail wraps the better I will get, here's hoping. All of the websites for the products I used are in the links so feel free to check them out, all of them have a great range of products. 

Hope you enjoyed this post and any feedback or tips on how to use these products or products I could try will be highly appreciated. As always hope everyone is having a great nail day and speak to you in the next post. 

Coming up next my Fragrance Direct haul ;-)