Nail art tutorial : Glittery pink and purple gradient nails

(I meant to write this entry ages ago but I kept putting it off until I eventually forgot about it. I only remembered when my friend, Camille, asked me to do some gradient nail art for her the other day.)

This was my nail art about a month ago. I basically recreated my midnight sky gradient nails using pinks and purple. In that entry I promised I’d post a tutorial on how I did my gradient nails, so here goes:

The colors I used: African Plum (Chic), Burgundy Frost (Chic), Pink Opal (Chic) and silver glitter polish (Del Sol).

First, I painted my nails using the African Plum shade:

Then I applied some Burgundy Frost to about 3/4th of each nail, starting from the tips:

Since I didn’t use a sponge, I created the “gradient” effect by wiggling and dabbing the nail polish brush where the pink and purple meet. It’s very messy at the moment, but it will look better once the glitter is applied.

You could actually end it here and just add some glitter if you want, but I chose to add a lighter shade (pink opal) at the tips:

I used the same technique (wiggling and dabbing the brush) to make the colors blend. If you look closely, you can see that it looks extremely messy:

When I did Camille’s nails this way the other day she kept complaining about how ugly it looked. I had to keep reminding her that it will look fine in the end when we add some glitter, which is the next and final step:

Ta-dah! The mess is covered up and it looks pretty now. The wonders of glitter~ I used silver because that’s the only one I had, but I think gold will look nice too.

Final results:

Sparkly pink and purple gradient nails.

I really love this simple design, and I’m sure I’m going to try many different variations of it using different colors in the future.