I never celebrated St. Patrick’s Day much, but this year, especially seeing all of the beautiful nail arts, I was inspired to create my own. This involved sponging, nail vinyls and free hand nail art, so I was definitely in for a challenge. This was surprisingly easy though! Find out how to recreate this at home below.
I’m not going to lie – this is a more complicated nail art. This won’t be so much for beginners. You can always take elements and make it work for you, though. Maybe only do clovers, or do the green stripes free hand or maybe just paint your nails green and put the gold glitter on top. There are so many ways to adjust nail art to your skill level.
What you’ll need:
- White nail polish (I used OPI Alpine Snow.)
- Green creme nail polish (I used China Glaze Treble Maker.)
- Gold glitter nail polish (I used China Glaze Bring on the Bubbly.)
- Green glitter nail polish (I used China Glaze Pine-ing For Glitter; Optional)
- Latex-free cosmetic sponge
- Medium and small sized dotting tool
- Straight nail vinyls
- Liquid latex (Optional, but this makes cleanup much easier.)
- Clean up brush and acetone
- Apply your base coat as normal.
- On the thumb, middle, pointer and pinky fingers, apply two coats of white. Apply a quick dry top coat to the pointer and pinky nails. Let dry for 15 minutes. It’s imperative you use a quick dry top coat on the pointer and pinky nails since you’ll be using nail vinyls. They tend to pick up the layer of polish beneath them if a top coat was not added.
- While you wait for the pointer and pinky nails to dry, move onto the middle and thumb nails. Draw on a three and four leaf clover onto the nails using the dotting tool. This is the best way to do it since the leaves are round. Look at a picture of clovers for some help. I put two clovers on my middle and one larger clover on my thumb.
- (Optional) Once those clovers dry, add the green glitter with the dotting tool for a touch of sparkle.
- Apply liquid latex around the ring finger. Once dry, apply the gold glitter polish to the latex-free sponge. The sponge will soak up excess nail polish base and will leave you with more glitter to apply. Dab on the glitter until the nail is completely opaque. You may need to apply the glitter onto the sponge multiple time. Remove the liquid latex once dry.
- Move back to the pointer and pinky nails. Apply straight nail vinyls to the nail. I used thicker nail vinyls, but whatever thickness and shape you want is fine. Once they are stuck down, apply the green polish over it one nail at a time. Immediately remove the nail vinyls from the nail, otherwise the polish will get too thick and won’t remove nicely.
- Apply the final top coat to all nails.
In all, this took me about an hour. While for some this may seem crazy, I don’t mind spending time doing nail art. The outcome is too beautiful!
What are you doing to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day? Let me know down below!
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