Tutorial: Fun with textured polish and striping tape!

Hello!

As you know, I recently received most of my shipment of the Julie G Gum Drops collection. With this and the three Zoya textured polishes I have, I now have a fair number of textured polishes, and that makes me want to play and experiment!

One thing I wanted to play with was striping tape manicures. I wasn't sure if they'd work because it's much harder to create a clean seal with textured polishes than smooth ones...and sure enough, when I first put the striping tape down, I found that it didn't adhere well at all. But regardless, I was determined to see it through and see if I could make it work. I'm happy to say that without too much difficulty, I did. If you know what to expect, I don't think you'll have a problem, either.

For my play session I started with Julie G Blueberry Fizz:

Let's use my index finger as the main example of how I did the striping:

There are a couple of things to notice here, and steps to take carefully:

1) The striping tape on the manicure doesn't stay put very well, particularly at the edges. The more you press it down, the more it will not want to stay put. So put it down where you want it, put the next piece down, etc., and then once you have all pieces placed, give it one final press-down and then quickly polish it.

2) See how the tape ends at my cuticle, and doesn't go past it? Because the edges of the tape want to stick up and not stay on the textured polish, you need to cut the edge close to cuticle or sides of your nail. If you do, they will stay down on the polish, as you can see my ends doing there. You don't have to do that on the free-edge of the nail (where you see mine sticking out); you can bend those over a bit, and use these edges to remove the strips when the time comes.

3) As much as possible, polish the nail in the direction of the nail tape, and only stroke once; this keeps the polish from bleeding under the tape. Then, pull off the strips right away, in reverse order from how you put them on, just like you would with a regular tape mani of this sort.

Here's how it turned out:

[ Now keep in mind, this isn't meant to be a finished wear-outside manicure, I was just playing around and testing things out. It's just for illustration purposes. : ) ]

You can see the index finger came out really well, as did the ring finger. On the middle finger and pinkie, I tried to do something different; I thought it would be cool to turn the design into a V, after I had done the same initial design as I did on the other nails. I altered the design by going over part of it with a second coat of my polish (China Glaze's Def Defying), and as you can see, it came out patchy. Also, if it had been equal coverage, it would have covered the texture, which I didn't want. Either way, it looks different and gunky from the rest, and I consider those two nails a fail. Next time I'll just tape the design that way in the first place.

The last thing to mention is that if your polish does seep a bit under your tape, I found it really easy to fix with the smallest dotting tool I have--I just literally pushed the edge of the polish to where I wanted the line to be, using the top of the dotting tool. The polish didn't seem to fully adhere to the textured polish until it was fully dry, so this was no problem at all, and left no residue. You can't even see the two places where I did it--I can't even remember where I did it, looking at the pictures now. :)

All in all, this wasn't nearly as impossible as I thought it was going to be, or as it seemed like it would be when I first tried to put the striping tape down on the polish. So if you go into it knowing that the tape doesn't stay down firmly like in regular manicures, but have faith it will work anyway if you follow my tips, you'll be okay. :)

Thanks for reading and I hope you found this helpful!

Hugs and love,
M.