Blue Stripes and Polka Dot Nails

A few days ago, one of my favorite nail polish bloggers, Polish Me Please,  posted an adorable mani using a bright yellow nail polish. She had yellow stripes on all of her nails with yellow polka dots on her accent nail and I loved the combo of the two. I had never tried the "strips of tape" technique to create stripes, but I've seen it around for years. It was time for me to give it a try myself!

The gist of the technique is probably kind of obvious, but you cut up thin strips of tape, press them onto your nails, and then paint over them with another polish. When you remove the tape, you're left with stripes.

I wanted to try a nautical-looking nail, so I picked out a navy blue polish - Sally Hansen's Blue It. This turned out to be a bad choice for a nautical nail because it's much too bright a blue for the job. I also needed a white polish for this look, so as usual I used my Sinful Colors Snow Me White polish.

First and foremost, cut your strips of tape. You do not want to be messing around with that task while you've got any paint on your nails already, right? I used masking tape... I literally have no idea why. Don't YOU do that too, for god's sake. Use Scotch tape, like a normal person would.

Next, paint all of your nails 2 coats of white and let them dry tooootttalllllllly totally totally. I made the mistake on Round 1 of this project of not waiting till my white nails were completely dry before laying down the tape. The result is that when you go to pull the tape up later, the white polish comes up with it! #Blurgh.

Now it's time to lay down your tape strips across all your nails except for the ring fingers. Laying the tape onto my nails in straight lines was actually harder than I thought it would be and so it took longer than I thought it would.

Using the blue polish, paint over the top of all of your nails, in the same direction as the tape. This is going to cause a mess all over your fingers. While this polish is still wet, peel off the tape strips. I read that it's good to use tweezers for this part, and that was a great tip. It keeps you from screwing up your nails by using them to peel the tape off.

Use a dotting tool to add blue dots on ring fingers:

And clean it up!

This was pretty labor intensive, if you ask me. I can't see myself doing this again - not to so many nails at once, anyway. I'd probably do it again as an accent nail.. and I'd definitely use Scotch tape and a different blue.

Have you done the tape technique before? It's good for color blocking too, which I will probably try soon.

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