Using Crackle Nail Polish for Easy Nail Designs
Hi. Talia here. If you are new to nails designs, or just want to try some easy nail art at home, this article is for you. Starting out with custom designs on your nails can seem intimidating at first, but it truly is not that hard – nail salons make a fortune off of women worried that it is too hard to do your own nails. You can achieve some cute nail designs at home, and have that new fashion nail look you’ve always wanted.
The current generation of beautiful creative nail designs is made much easier by products such as Crackle Nail Polish (The OPI Katy Perry line of polish for example). This new nail polish is one of the hottest trends on the market right now – and is something you can easily do at home, and it is fairly quick as well!
Don’t have art skills? Worried about how to get a unique and creative look on each of your nails, yet not so unique that they don’t look like they belong on the same hands? Using Crackle Nail polish, you essentially paint your nails with a base coat of polish [say you use black nail polish], and then apply a special crackle polish [i.e. like China Glaze Crackle Collection] in a contrasting or complimentary color on top. As the crackle polish dries, it creates a shattered look to your nails, allowing the base color polish to show through the cracks. Because each application on each nail dries differently, you have different “crack” patterns on each nail – yet because it is the same basic nail design and same colors, it still looks like a matched set of fingers!
Using Colors with Crackle Polish for Creative Nails
So not only is the effect of the polish pretty cool, you can have almost an infinite variety of easy creative and cute nail designs by simply choosing different base colors and then different crackle polish colors on top. How cute your nails will look is dependent in large part on the combination of colors you choose. The base coat of nail polish can be any brand of nail polish and any color [although of course it should be one you've used before and know how durable it is]. Designing do it yourself, unique and glamorous nail art with a bottle of polish and a bottle of crackle polish is fun, easy, and doesn’t take much longer than doing a single coat on your nails!
China Glaze makes a nice Crushed Candy color in the crackle collection. This one is fun to do over a pure white base coat, or for a glaring, bold design you can even do over a red base polish.
OPI Nail Polish Brands recently released a couple of way fun colors – OPI White Shatter and OPI Red Shatter Crackle Polishes. These are inspired from the French Open and Serena Williams and are new in 2011. They also have a gold shatter polish – even with just these three colors you can imagine the combinations to try with different base coat colors! So don’t limit yourself just to Katy Perry OPI polishes!
The funny, little known fact is that Covergirl actually released a crackle nail product back sometime in the 80′s or 90′s – however, back then the trend didn’t catch fire like it has today, and the polish resulted in different size crackles [and durability] at the time.
Note: A couple of places I like to buy nail polish online is the Home Shopping Network, as they have a good selection of nail polish brands at excellent prices [click here to browse their polishes], as well as Sephoras online site which carries a slightly different set of high quality brands – click here to see their selections and prices. Amazon also often has hard to find OPI and other nail polish brands as well as other cute nail design products.
I would highly recommend starting some cute, easy nail designs at home by buying a bottle of crackle polish [less than $10 for most brands], and take a couple of hours out of your next Sunday morning to create a new design on your nails – experiment and have fun! Beautiful nails really don’t take a ton of time [or money] to achieve!
Talia