red - gold - black striped manicure

hi peeps, today is a new manicure day. i felt like doing something with stripes as i'm a huge stripes addict (like shirts, shoes etc!)

ok so first to what you'll ned for this manicure:
- 3 colours of nail polish of your choice - i used: essence stamp me black!, essence fateful desire and catrice in the bronx
- top and base coat
- sticky tape
- scissors

ok so start with a coat of base coat and then add your first colour all over the nail. i started with the red one. i didn't take a picture because i was a bit tired and didn't remember.

ok then take your tape and cut little stripes, don't make them too big though or they won't stick well. here i'd like to tell you about a little trick i learned on my countless hours on the net on other peoples nail blogs. take the tape and stick it on your palm. take it off and on again for a while until the hardcore stickiness is gone. like that you won't rip off the underlying colour. apply them like this:

then take your second colour and paint the nail again. remember that when taking a darker colour like black, think about what goes on top of it.

leave the tape for about 5 minutes. i had to find out the hard way that by removing it too early you'll have smudges and it will look like the cheese when biting a piece of pizza...streeeeetching. it'll look like this:

now take the tape again and remember that you have to cover everything that you'll want to show up after applying the third colour. so if you want a golden - red - black mix, on my index finger, i would cover everything besides the uppermost part of my nail. like this:

if you want the newest colour in the middle, red - gold - black, cover everything else, like this:

after letting it dry and taking everything away it looks like this:

now to some practical stuff in the end. i added a layer of top coat after every colour, because i found it helped prevent removing some of the underlying colour when you remove the tape.

aaand this mani is perfect if you have one day where you feel like one colour and on the second or third day the tips of your nails chipped away a bit, cause you'll just cover that with another colour :) perfect, right?

so go try it out and show us your best pictures or comment as we would love to hear from you!

xoxo, the beauty