Glitter Ombre Manicure Tutorial

One of the hardest yet most trivial decisions a girl will have to make is what color to paint her nails.  Each time I paint mine I have to ask myself a million questions.  Should I go classic red or spice things up with some bright pink?  If I paint my nails blue, do I have to wear blue every day this week?    Can I pull off black nail polish?  It’s exhausting.  Then you have to make the tough decision, do I want to add something else or have I already invested way too much time into this?

While most of the time I stick with one basic color (because let’s face it, giving yourself a manicure can be pretty time consuming) sometimes I want to change it up a bit.  One of my favorite nail designs is glitter ombre.  I kept seeing all these pictures on Pinterest of these beautiful glitter tipped nails, but had no idea how they achieved such a look.  After some trial and error, I’ve figured out a method that I think works pretty well and I thought I’d share in case any of you want to try it! 

After starting out with a base coat, do a couple coats of your color.  I decided to use Essie’s Geranium since my cousin’s wedding was on Saturday and I knew the bright orangey-red would pop against the blue dress I was going to wear! 

 After a couple coats of color (with adequate time for drying in between), start on the first coat of glitter.  I used Nicole by O.P.I.’s Kissed at Midnight from the Selena Gomez collection.  I normally do the glitter in three steps/coats.  Make sure your glitter polish has different sizes of glitter in it. 

1)      Starting about midway up your nail, do a thin coat of glitter all the way to the tip.  No need to make sure there is a lot of glitter on this coat.  Just one swoop should be perfect!

   2)      After you let that dry, do another coat but start about halfway between where you started 

    with the first coat of glitter and the tip of your nail.  Paint from there to the tip of your nail and try to get some of the bigger pieces of glitter on your nail this time.  So now you have one coat of glitter on part of your nail and two at the tip. 

   3)      Finish up the glitter with one more coat just on the very tip of your nail.  Make sure you get plenty of glitter on the tip of your nail with this coat!

After the final touch of top coat, you have a beautiful glitter ombre manicure!  I’ve done this using several different combinations of colors/glitter polishes and each time it has turned out beautiful!  Light pink polish with pink and purple glitter is definitely my favorite combination!  If you’re like me and a fan of all things sparkly, I would definitely give this ombre manicure a try!

Thanks for reading!!

~Sarah