Tutorial: Gum Drops on Lilac Featuring Pixi and JulieG Frosted Gum Drops

Yes! My very first nail tutorial. Ok, well, still photo tutorial. This wasn't easy as my camera freaked out on me with it's settings, but I fiddled around with it to get my correct settings back.

A word of warning, YES! I know my nail is stained, I haven't had time to actually give my nails a good soaking. They've actually far worse than that.

So lets get started?

What I'm using. JulieG's Frosted Gum Drops in Rock Candy and Crushed Candy as well as PIXI Luminous Lilac. Any type of colors and textured polishes can be used to achieve this little nail design, it doesn't have to be limited to what I used.

First we're going to start with clean nails. Apply a base coat if desired (or just on the area that isn't going to have the Frosted Gum Drops on it as it's suggested that a base coat isn't needed). Allow the base coat to fully dry. Next take a piece of scotch tape (any brand) and lay it across the nail on a diagonal (either direction works). Make sure that the edge of the tape is flat against the nail, if there's any gaps, polish then can bleed under the tape. 

 Tip: If you're worried about the tape pulling up your base coat, simply pat the scotch tape across the back of your hand to eliminate some of the stickiness.

 Then take your lilac color (I'm using Pixi's Luminous Lilac as it was the only one I have? I only have one? Whoa.) and fill in the area of the nail that isn't covered by tape (I used 3 coats). If you're like me and clean up at the end, you may have flooding in the cuticle area. If you're neat and avoid the flooding, I bow down to you :D

I took the edges of the tape and tucked them down, loosely around the finger, especially the tape near the edge of the nail as that section tends to lift up on its own accord. You don't have to wait until this dries to remove the tape, I've allowed polish to dry with tape on and in my experience the dried polish going from the tape to the nail created a mess that had to be redone. It's your own preference though.

Tip: If bleeding occurs under the tape, you can easily clean it up and create a crisp edge by using an angle brush (I use an EcoTools angled eyeliner brush), dipping it into nail polish remover and carefully going along the edge to erase any boo-boos.

 Step 3 (it's step 3 right?) take another piece of scotch tape and block off a thin section on a diagonal. Try to get it as evenly spaced as possible (coming from the one who slapped down the tape without checking to see how the spacing was). If it isn't evenly spaced, that's OK. One might actually like it not being evenly spaced.

Coming right up, apply 3 coats of Rock Candy. I carefully followed along Luminous Lilac's line to try and get as much of a clean edge as possible.

Remove the tape after applying the 3rd coat of Rock Candy. Then (this step is featured in the finished photo) I applied Crushed Candy, first on an angle, following along the edge that the scotch tape left for Rock Candy, then I simply filled in the rest of the nail. I repeated this one more time as Crushed Candy is fully opaque with 2 coats. After that was done, I simply cleaned up the excess along the cuticles and any polish that got onto the skin. I actually was cleaning up as I went along with the steps.

Final thing that I did was apply a top coat ONLY over Luminous Lilac. For that I used my handy dandy Inm Out The Door.

The Final Results?

Close Up

No cameras were harmed while taking this photo, just severely threatened while doing a balancing act.