Floss Your Nails! - Nail Art Tutorial

For my first nail tutorial, I thought I'd show a new technique that I tried today. I learned it from cutepolish on YouTube. I get a lot of my nail art designs and inspiration from cutepolish, she has great tutorials! I really like how today's design turned out, though I don't think pictures do it justice.

Today I did a multi-coloured stripe design. You don't need thin brushes to create the stripes. The stripes are done with floss! More specifically, floss picks. Like this:

It makes creating stripes really easy and gives a really cool effect.


The Tutorial:

First, pick 3-4 colours for your stripes. I picked dark purple, light purple, silver, and black. Start by painting your nails one of the colours. I did dark purple with a silver accent nail. By the time the design was finished, the accent nail wasn't very noticeable anymore so it was kind of pointless. If you want to have an accent nail that really stands out, I suggest using different colours for it's stripes than the rest of your nails.

It took two coats on each nail to make them opaque. This base coat doesn't have to be perfect, we'll clean up any polish on the skin at the end.

Now we're gonna add stripes! Starting with a colour different than your base coat, paint the floss with a thin layer of the polish.

Then place the floss on one side of your nail and roll it horizontally across the nail. I did my best to capture this, but the camera decided to focus on my thumb instead of my index finger.

It doesn't have to look perfect, that's the great thing about this design. Create a bunch of stripes on each nail with this first colour, adding more polish to the floss as needed. Then use your next colour to create more stripes. Don't be afraid to overlap colours, it just adds to the effect. After using all of your colours, make a few stripes in your base coat colour to finish off the design. You can add a top coat if you like, but I skipped the top coat (personal preference). Now you'll have something like this:

It's a little messy, so take a q-tip dipped into nail polish remover and carefully clean off the nail polish that got on your skin. Once it's all cleaned up, it will look like this:

And you're done! Hope you enjoyed this tutorial!

-Mariah