Preppy Stripes & Tutorial

Hello there! Today I bring you some nail art I did Thursday night. I ordered some striping tape off of Amazon a couple weeks ago, and I hadn't gotten around to using it yet, so I decided it was time to break it out. I wanted bold colors, and ended up picking China Glaze First Mate, China Glaze Grape Pop, and OPI Red My Fortune Cookie. The overall effect reminds me a bit of a prep school uniform, hence the title.

natural light

Click "read more" to see the tutorial:

Ta-da! I was really happy with the way this turned out, though as you can see, I messed up in a couple of spots. I decided take tutorial pictures as I went along in case anyone is interested in replicating this look, and I then I thought I'd do the cool kid thing and make my first animated GIF. Here goes:

1. Apply base coat and one coat of your base color. It doesn't matter if it's not perfectly opaque since you're going to be covering most of it up.

2. Cut all the striping tape you will need (I did one hand at a time) and put it somewhere that you won't accidentally stick it down in a way that's hard to get up with wet nails. Then, place the tape on your nails in diagonal stripes. I used four stripes for my thumb, three for my middle three fingers, and two for my pinky.

3. Paint the stripes over the tape. Be careful with two things: use as little polish as possible - as you can see, I added a little too much polish on the middle blue stripe, which ended up causing a little bit of blue to go onto the red when I peeled the tape up. The second thing is that you need to make sure you color in the lines, but that's not too hard as long as you're paying attention.

4. Peel up the tape.

5. Clean up your fingers with nail polish remover and an eyeliner brush, then add top coat, and you're done. Congratulations!

I hope you enjoyed my tutorial. Let me know if you decide to try it out!