Don’t worry, I promise I’m done with nail polish reviews for a little while!

I’ve had Yuna from Zoya’s new Fall collection for a little while, and I kept wanting to try it out but it was a little dark for the summer clothes I was still wearing because it was still hot in AZ. Finally, I decided that it was October, so I was going to wear dark nails no matter how hot it was. I took off that blood red I reviewed last week and replaced it with Yuna and I was happy. What a gorgeous grey with bronzey greeny shimmery micro-glitter! So beautiful, so unusual.

The very next day I got my hands on the new Matte Velvet topcoat from Zoya and I had a thought… Wouldn’t it be cool if I did sweet matte tips and then I would have an awesome, edgy Fall manicure? Surely my meager nail art skills were up to the task!

I’d read that you could use normal stationary tape for masking your nails to do your tips like this, so I grabbed some Scotch tape and went to town with my matte topcoat. It was so easy! It was going to be so cool!

Well, it didn’t go quite as well as I had planned. The tape pulled up from my nails in spots. In some cases this allowed the top coat to leak under the tape and extend the effect farther than I wanted to. In other spots, when the tape moved it also lifted the top coat with it, so that parts of the tip stayed shiny. And in one spot, the tape took some of the nail color with it, leaving a blank white spot on my nail!

I have a couple thoughts for how to make this manicure idea more successful for next time:

1. Fit the tape to my nail instead of wrapping all the way around my finger.
2. Try masking tape instead.
3. Apply to a fresh manicure instead of a day-old one that already has a top coat.
4. Try it with a different color. Yuna’s charm comes from the bronze glitter, and the matte dulls that effect, which makes it look like a completely different color and made for a less attractive matte tip. I think a simpler color would be better suited to the matte tip treatment.

This just goes to show that it’s really good to experiment with makeup ideas when you have nothing else going on. I didn’t have any performances last weekend so it didn’t matter that I had wacky nails. If I had done this right before a gig I would have had to remove it right away and try to do something else attractive with my nails on a short time frame! It also goes to show that maybe I shouldn’t try a new-to-me nail technique at 11pm, because what seems like a good idea late at night might seem like a mistake in the morning.