Guide To Glitter Nails

It's getting to that time of the year when you're dying to crack out the glitter nail polish. I mean who doesn't want glittering nails at Christmas time?! But if you've ever worn glitter nail polish before you know that it can be the devil. I mean it can seriously be a massive pain in the arse to get your glitter polish looking flawless and then once you've eventually managed to get it looking acceptable, trying to get the stuff off again is a bloody nightmare. 

I've managed to hone my glitter polish skills over the past few months and I decided to share what I've learnt and right in time for the festive glitter filled season! 

The Application

Firstly, let's start with the glitter types. You will usually find glitter polishes in 2 main formulas, densely packed or loosely packed. The difference is pretty self-explanatory and the way that you should treat them is basically the same.  

If we start with the densely packed glitter (Nicole by OPI in ), you can see that one coat of polish gives a nice relatively even covering of glitter over the nail, it could definitely be worn like that if you wanted to and it would still look nice. However, what happens if you want a really densely packed glitter effect? Do you keep applying it with the brush in the hopes that it will eventually dry? 

Nah, grab yourself some cheap make-up sponges, paint the polish onto the sponge and dab it onto the nail. The sponge absorbs all the clear polish and leaves the glitter behind meaning you can easily dab on the glitter and get the effect you want without all the ridiculous hassle of doing it with the brush. 

Loosely packed polish is much the same, apart from it's even harder to get a good finish out of it. There is nothing worse than applying a glitter that takes about 50 layers to look even and well covered. This is where that magic little trick with the sponge comes into play once again. Just brush it onto the sponge, dab away and look at that final result! Super messy but the coverage is amazing and takes much less time, polish and effort to get it looking good. 

The Clean-up

Once you've perfected your nails the worse thing is trying to get rid of it. Glitter is notoriously difficult to get rid of and leaves you feeling like your only options are to pick it off or soak your fingertips in nail varnish remover - which is not fun kids. However, there are alternatives. 

Peel off base coats - These are big in America but not so easy to get hold of in the UK. However, Maybelline makes a peel-off base coat that works fairly well. You are meant to use these as you would a normal base coat, however, I've had a varying success that way. Instead, I've found that using it right before you apply the glitter works best. In the above photos I have applied the colour as normal, applying a normal base coat, two coats of nail polish and a top coat. I then applied the peel-off base coat allowed it to set and then applied the glitter in the process explained above. As you can see it neatly takes off all the glitter and leaves you with the normal polish underneath that is a doddle to take off. 

Acetone and a small brush - I've found that when removing glitter polish normal nail polish remover just doesn't cut it. Instead, I use a pure acetone (actually meant for removing artificial nails!), and a cheap eyeliner brush that works perfectly for getting around the edges of your nails and doesn't matter if it gets ruined by the acetone. You can bypass the peel-off base coat and just use pure acetone to take off glitter polish, and that does work but I wouldn't recommend it, as acetone strips all the natural oils out of your nails and leaves them brittle. 

Instead, I like to use this purely for clean-up. The sponging technique tends to leave a bit of a mess as you can see above, so by just dipping a brush into acetone and cleaning the edges you can get a really neat effect in no time at all! 

If you have any tips for glitter polish then please leave them in the comments!