French Tip Nail Tutorial

 

French Tip Nail Tutorial

Welcome back to another HONA nail art tutorial. Today, we're going over the French manicure, a salon favourite that is notoriously difficult to master. All you're gonna need for this look is white detail paint, a striper brush, Pink Cloud gel polish, topcoat and basecoat.

There are a couple of methods when it comes to mastering a French Tip Manicure, take a look at our two recommended techniques below and discover which suits you, method two is particularly useful for smaller, more square nails.

 

METHOD ONE

So, for the first step you’ll need to paint on a layer of the HONA Complete Base basecoat and Pink Cloud gel polish. Next, you’ll need to go in with white detail paint, marking both sides of the sidewalls. Then put a line right across the free edge. This will determine the height of the French Manicure.

Then you will need to paint two straight diagonal lines all the way from the dots down to the free edge. Once you've done this, you'll be left with an upside-down ‘A’ shape. This is going to be your structure, ready for the branch.
Next you’ll need to pop a little mark at the very centre of the nail and this is going to help you decide where to finish the curve line. Pull the brush into the product that's already there to create that perfect ‘C’ curve. You now have the choice to continue to fill in the manicure using your striper brush, or to save time you can use a square full coverage gel brush and quickly fill in the rest of your French Manicure.

Then if you need to, you can go back in with a striper brush or liner brush and tidy up the ‘C’ curve as well. There you have it, that is method one. 

 

METHOD TWO

Moving on to the next method, you’ll be doing more or less exactly the same but this time on a square nail as a micro French Manicure instead. So, you’ll be starting off the same way, doing one line at the bottom and two straight diagonal lines which go from the dots down to the free edge.

Okay, so you've got our basic structure ready for the micro French tip and now you can go in with your striper brush and fill in the tiny gaps.

Once you’ve filled in those gaps, you can go straight in with the ‘C’ curve. You can still mark the centre point if you feel more comfortable doing so, or you can do it by eye.

And there you have it, two French Tip Manicure methods!

P.S. It’s important to note that the more diagonal and closer together those lines are that you did originally, the narrower and the pointier that ‘C’ curve is going to be, whereas if your diagonals are further apart and not as angled, you're going to get a much wider ‘C’ curve, which is really great for a micro French Manicure.