I’ve been doing French manicures since the 5th grade! I don’t know, I guess just having an older sister makes you want to do everything that she does.  I do my french tips free-hand, and I know it’s hard to get started.  But keep trying and one day it’ll take you no longer than 5 minutes!

This is the Sally Hansen's French manicure set that I normally use. You can get it at practically any drug store!

filed but unpolished nail

First file your nail. (You can look at yesterday’s post for a tutorial.) Then you can grab any type of conditioning/moisturizing clear nail polish as a base.

Next select a white tip polish.  Most of these come in different types of brushes (ie: sharp tip, regular brush, angled brushes, etc) but you can do trial & error until you find the brush tip that you’re more comfortable with.  Don’t have a cow if you can’t make the white line perfect. You can just follow your white fingertip as best as you can, but you also will have to “fake” a nice line because most of the time, our white tips are crooked and curved weird.

You can tell that I scraped this tip with my other fingernail, but don't worry about the bumps that stick out. You can take care of that with coats of the top polish!

Lastly, select a pink OR clear polish that you want.  I like painting a pale pink color and then topping it off with the clear conditioning coat again.  (My nails are pretty dry.)  I like to make this the thickest layer, so that it won’t chip as much and I can cover any “fix-ups” that I had made.

finished!

Some helpful tips:

- if you add TOO MUCH nail polish, the polish might chip off easily. BUT if you add too little polish, it might chip off easily too! Find a balance so that your polish will stay on as long as possible. Rule of thumb: one normal brush dip, then slide off half of it back in the bottle and use the other side. That should be a good amount per nail except for your pinkie. For your pinkie use about 75% of that amount!

- do NOT do your nails if you are about to go to sleep.  For some reason, they will always get messed up. You might be sleeping on your nails in a weird position for a long time and you’re more likely to mess it up even if you think you’ve waited long enough.

- also do NOT do your nails if you are in a hurry! Nails take a long time to dry—maybe about 45-minutes to 1 hour for it to be 10000000% dry.  Remember all the things that can happen to ruin a perfectly good set of polished nails: zipping up your jeans in the bathroom, tying up your hair with a hair-tie, opening doors and starting your car with very ragged sided keys!

- very dark nail polish will start staining your real nails. So if you love dark polish, try switching off–a dark shade for a few weeks then a light or clear polish.

- if you mess up on a nail during the polishing process, just wipe off everything and start clean. It saves you the trouble and sometimes it’s best just to start over. (Especially if this involves your 9 other nails being wet!)

- continue to file your nails even with polished nails. It will help your nails not shift or chip!

- don’t attempt to grow your nails because you feel like you have to. Longer nails are definitely more high maintenance. Short nails are cute too!

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