DIY: Ombre Glitter Nails

Today was fancy nails day in my house. Not much else to do, due to the rain. The rest of the afternoon will probably be spent drinking tea and doing not a whole lot - I think I'll watch Long Way Down [Ewan MacGregor and Charlie Boorman riding motorcycles from Scotland to South Africa] - then going out for supper. Good thing my nails are fancy for it.

I did glitter ombre - something I've been meaning to try for a while - and it actually turned out really nicely! I didn't take pictures while I was doing my nails, so I just will type out the instructions and show you pictures of what you'll need, etc.

So obviously, you'll need nail polish. I suppose you could just do glitter with no base colour, but I like the base colour to make it extra fancy fancy. I chose to do my bright Barbie pink (Revlon Pink Lingerie) with silvery-pink glitter (Sally Hansen Strobe Light). And, as always [the one step I usually neglect], a top coat. So now you're set to go!

1. If you're a base coat user, do this now.

2. Paint your nails with your solid base colour. I did two coats. Do as many coats as you like. I am no nail dictator. Wait to dry.

3. Paint the top 2/3 of your nail with glitter and wait for it to dry. (Another way of wording this might be "paint two thirds of the way down your nail...)

4. Paint the top 1/3 of your nail with glitter and wait for it to dry. This will start to create your ombre look.  ("one third of the way down your nail...")

5. Paint just the very tip of your nail with glitter. This will give you the most sparkles at the top, graduating down to no sparkles at the bottom. If you want to reverse that and make it so your nails have the most glitter closest to your cuticle, just do the opposite - paint the bottom 2/3, then the bottom 1/3, then a small strip by your cuticle.

6. After all that was sort of tacky and almost dry, I went back and very carefully touched up places with less glitter that needed more glitter, and added a few single sparkles to the bottom parts of my nails.

7. Once the glitter is totally dry, cover it all up with a top coat, and voila! Ombre glitter nails! Go forht and be fancy!!!