Red Hearts & Polka Dots: Valentine's Day Nails

Creating relatively decent looking hearts on my nails is much easier now that I have a dotting tool! "Two dots and tap" and voilà! HEARTS SO REAL YOU CAN PRACTICALLY HEAR THAT SHIT BEATING.

PRACTICALLY.

Here's a new Valentine's Day nail polish look that uses the technique:

The colors I chose to use:

A List by Essie

This off-white, sort-of-unnamed Love & Beauty polish.

Hey here's something that's pretty weird. This off-white nail polish is scented. As if nail polish isn't scented enough, they wanted to try to make this one smell like - if I'm to trust the sticker on top of the bottle - Jasmine. I'm going to be honest and say I don't know what Jasmine is supposed to smell like - unless we're talking about the Disney Princess, because she smells like Arabian nights and centuries-old gold. #Obvi. The polish doesn't smell like gold, but its scent falls somewhere between "This is moderately un-terrible" and "This is full of chemicals. Stop smelling it."

So even though I'm armed with a dotting tool that would make a dalmatian jeally, I still have my Argyle Nails Fail fresh in my head so I'm trying to dial back my instinct to just go straight to my nails with the polish - thus, a few practice runs were required on a piece of paper first:

NO SHAME IN MY PRACTICE GAME. Yours either, I promise. See my attempt at a little red mustache graphic? Good thing I didn't go straight to the nails with that one!!

Alright SEW now we get started!

1. Paint all of your nails 2 coats of white:

2. Use the dotting tool to form a nice big heart in the center of each nail. Place two dots side-by-side, and then use your dotter to drag the dots down diagonally and connect the two sides of the heart. I finished the nails off by using the smaller end of my dotting tool to add some red polka dots around the hearts:

I did 3 small hearts with polka dots on my thumbnails, since I had a little more room to play around with:

If you try this, tweet me a picture @akaBailey!