Mermaid nail art is something I’ve been wanting to do for SO long, and I FINALLY did it! I was initially missing one key piece: a mermaid scales stamping plate. I have some mermaid scales nail vinyls here, but they’re not the same as a stamping plate. You can achieve the same results, but you have to do things in reverse and I wanted the stamp as opposed to the vinyl. I found a KADS stamping plate with a scales pattern on Amazon Prime so I ordered it right away and it arrived in two days, woo! That was last week so obviously when I sat down to do my nails Friday night it HAD to be some mermaid nail art.
I CAN’T STOP LOOKING AT MY NAILS!!!
Ok, so here are all the products and tools I used for this nail art:
- OPI – Natural Nail Base Coat
- China Glaze – A Waltz In The Park
- China Glaze – For Audrey
- butterLONDON – Matte Finish Topcoat
- Born Pretty – Stamping Polish in Moonlit
- Makeup sponges
- KADS stamping plate MIN 006
- Born Pretty – Large Jelly Stamper & Nail Scraper
- Born Pretty – Manicure Saver Cotton Claw
- Cuticula – Liquid Nail Tape
After applying my base coat I applied two coats of A Waltz In The Park (purple). I waited 5-10 minutes for that to dry, then I applied some liquid nail tape on my fingers around the nails to help minimize the cleanup after doing the gradient. I used the makeup sponges to create the gradient with A Waltz In The Park and For Audrey (blue) – this is where it can get messy and you can end up with nail polish all over your fingers so the liquid nail tape really helps keep your skin clean. Once the gradient was done I removed the nail tape and applied two coats of the butterLONDON Matte Finish Topcoat. Once that was dry (about 10 minutes later) I applied more liquid nail tape (because stamping can be messy too), then using my large stamper and the KADS stamping plate I stamped the scales with the Moonlit stamping polish.
The Manicure Saver Cotton Claw is to grab cotton balls that I dip in acetone to clean my stamper and plate between stamping my fingers. It’s seriously a must have for stamping!!!
And after ALL that work this is the end result and it’s EVEN BETTER THAN I HAD IMAGINED! You guys have no idea how crazy excited I am about this nail art!!!
Here’s a picture in direct sunlight:
Because I wanted this nail art to last as long as possible I added a gel topcoat (Bio Seaweed Gel No-Wipe Topcoat). You can see the shine of the gel topcoat in this next picture.
The KADS stamping plate worked really well and I’m very happy with my purchase! One thing I must say though is that the designs are quite small; the scales just fit on my thumbs and I have skinny fingers. So I’m not sure that this would fit a regular-sized thumb (or anything bigger). Other than that it worked really well for the scales design so I’m looking forward to trying out the other designs.
These pictures don’t do this nail art justice guys, I seriously don’t want to take it off! Thankfully with the gel topcoat these will last a good week and should take me into Friday when I’ll be doing something new.
Have you done mermaid nail art?
– Chantal 🙂
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Computer geek by day and super mom by night, Chantal loves to try products of any kind and share her thoughts with the world.