Slightly Festive Starry Nails

This post is a little later than usual, I try to post on Monday's. This week I just haven't been feeling it and stopped painting my nails after just one coat, until today. I removed the slightly chipped polish I had on from the weekend and repainted and jazzed them up. I also got out one of my lightbox lights, so excuse the yellow colouring on most of my photos I have now learnt that the light needs to be filtered through the white lightbox material to stop that from happening. Alternatively I could buy a new light bulb, but I don't think my student budget allows for such purchases.

My finished design ended up looking quite festive, although I really didn't mean it to. I just wanted to paint something simple on my nails. I think the two colours are what make it festive, the dark purple and silver. Winter, I don't know.

Keep reading for a breakdown and some slightly better and slightly worse photos.


So to begin I painted my nails with a colour I love. It's from NailsInc, and I got it in a magazine last year. The shade is Hanover Square, it's this gorgeous deep purple, I'm definitely going to need to replace this colour when it runs out. One coat of this and I moved on. I would usually do two coats, but I knew my design would cover most of the nail so I didn't want to waste polish.

Next I found the smallest dotting tool I could and just placed 5 dots around in a circle. I always started at my cuticle to place the first dot and them two along the centre horizontally and two slightly closer at the edge of my nail. The picture should help explain what I mean, these are going to form the basis of the star points, so try and keep them as small as possible.

First yellow-toned photo of this post

I then proceeded to use my striping brush and joined up the points opposite each other.

So from the point at the cuticle I drew two lines down the the bottom two points. I then joined the outermost point to the other one level with it and one at the bottom and then drew the last line between the other one at the bottom and the other outmost one. This made photo 4, all the points joined up to two other points. I then used my brush to add polish inside the lines. Some places needed more than one coat as the polish I was using, a 2True shade, is like a clear shade pigmented by tiny bits of silver glitter so the glitter concentration varied a lot. A found a dabbing motion was the best way of putting it on as painting it in stroke actions just moved too much glitter.

So this was then done on each of my nails and I added a topcoat, pretty simple right?

The dots need to be eased into the star shape if not you may end up with a sherif badge instead of a star, I found I had to adjust the shape a lot as some of dots were bigger than others.