As the title suggested this Star Gazing nail art was designed by my Fiancee. Given that my Fiancee designed this, I suggested that he should also name it. He initially jokingly said Stars and Sh*t. However, he eventually decided on the name Star Gazing Nails.
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The Base
The brief was that the nails were to be green on the bottom and black on top. He suggested that the green should be as dark as possible to work with the black. When I asked if it should be solid colours or ombre he selected solid colours.
For the green, we chose BMC (aka Maniology), tree of life as this is the darkest green that I have. For the black nail polish, we selected OPI, Lady in black. I applied 1 coat of each of the polishes. This increased the chance of the green chipping however I wasn’t too worried about chipped nail polish. If I wasn’t in ISO I would have applied two coats of the green polish.
Anyway back onto the design. The green polish covered the entire nail. I waited for the polish to completely dry. Even once I thought the polish was dry I waited even longer to be sure as I would be using sticker guides for the next step. If your nails are a little tacky then the sticker may damage the polish when the sticker is removed.
Add your sticker guides to your desired location and paint the black polish on the top of the nail. Try and pop the sticker at the same point on each nail. It’s important that that the sticker guides are pressed down with no gaps so that you end up with straight lines and no spillover.
Star Gazing Nail Art | Nail Stamping (plus an alt method)
The second part of the brief was to add stars to the design. I found a few different stamping plates that had stars or galaxy related images and pulled them all out as I wasn’t sure which one I was going to use. In the end, I went with a solar system image on Maniology plate BM-610.
I used Konad silver polish for the stamping and my konad stamper. I used the Konad stamper as its firmer and I felt it would work better with picking up the glittery polish. This is especially after struggling to pick up the image with the softer clear stamper when I last tried to use my silver stamping polish.
What to do if you don’t have stamping equipment??
If you don’t have the stamping tools there are a few options. The best one if you don’t have any tools is to use a toothpick.
Put a small dollop of silver polish on your nail and then use the toothpick to create small lines of the dot, so that you end up with a star. If you’re not feeling confident, try practising on a piece of paper first.
Another option is to use a dotting tool or if some nail stickers if you have them.
Overall
It was a lot of fun collaborating with my partner to create the Star Gazing Nails!! Feel free to DM on Instagram me if you would like to challenge me with a design – @theNailchronicle
