One of the best thing about reading nail blogs is seeing all the innovative ideas that come from different bloggers. A couple of weeks ago I tried the cling film technique on my Batman nails, this week I’m trying DIY nail stickers which I saw done by Bregje at Oooh Shinies.
The theory behind it is simple – paint an opaque layer of nail polish onto a ziploc bag and leave to dry. Once it is dry, peel the layer off the ziploc bag and cut it out to make a sticker for your nail. I painted a few different test colours from what was sitting around on my coffee table and decided to use China Glaze Elephant Walk and Exotic Encounters. I used craft scissors to cut up my colour patches into strips with a textured edge, then lined up the colours and pressed them together which stuck them together enough to create one sticker for my nails and this is what I ended up with when I put them vertically on my nails over a base colour of OPI Skull and Glossbones:
I love how crisp the lines are in comparison to trying this with a tape manicure where the lines are never this crisp. However the downside of this was that the polish wouldn’t bend and mold to the nail shape very well. I used a bit of top coat to stick down the stickers and then another coat of top coat across the whole nail, but I ended up using acetone and a brush to melt the edges to make the mold to my nail beds. The other issue I had was getting rid of the excess on my free edge. While I could clean up the rest as normal, it was impossible to get it to wrap my tips. So while it looks fantastic from a distance, up close it’s not so great.
Here is a close up of my pointer nail where you can see the stickers didn’t play nice with my top coat and the sticker is peeling away from my tip. If I tried this again, I think I would try sticking on one layer at a time rather than both together to see if they’re anymore flexible on their own. Bregje’s nails look amazing when she does this so I’m convinced practice will make perfect :)
Has anyone else tried this? Does anyone have any tips for me?
i tried this once, using smaller stickers worked better. i love this design
Thanks for the tip. I want to try it out again so I will try to go for smaller scale next time.
I’ve done a couple of bows and sometimes it’s hard to get them to stick, maybe do a top coat over the base and then put the sticker on while it’s still tacky? That might make it super thick, but might stick better.