Half-moon manicure tutorial

This week I had to cut my nails drastically - they have been in awful condition since I went surfing on holiday and since then i've been covering up the damage with polish but they were all splitting and peeling and I couldn't hide the damage anymore so unfortunately they had to go :(

After leaving them nail polish-free for about 5 days I really couldn't stand the sight of my tiny 'naked' nails anymore aha...so i decided to paint them, and to make up for the previous plainess I wanted to make them more interesting with a half-moon (or reverse french) mani :)

Here's what I came up with: (before cleanup sorry aha)


I used:

OPI Rumple's Wiggin & Max Factor nailfinity 882 Angel Nails (metallic silver/purple colour)

How to do the half-moon manicure
1) Remove previous nail polish and apply a clear base coat

2) Once base coat is dry, apply the colour you want as the half-moon, so here I applied the metallic purple/silver colour from Max Factor. This is quite opaque so I only needed 1 coat, do more if you need to but try to use opaque colours otherwise you will end up with looads of layers of nail polish which will peel.

3) Wait about 15-20 minutes for this layer to dry completely, and then stick on nail guide stickers where you want the half-moon shape to be at the base of your nail. The sticker protects areas you want nail polish free. Here's a (pretty bad, sorry!) photo explaining what I mean:



4) Apply your main colour (here I used OPI Rumple's Wiggin which is a lilac) from the nail guide sticker upwards, and leave to dry. Once it is fully dry remove the sticker and apply a top coat to seal it :)

Tah-dah! You are done :D

I've tried doing it the other way around and putting the main colour on first, then using tips to draw on the half-moons but even with the tip guides this gets quite messy and it's difficult to get the right shape, so this technique works better!

There are soo many combos you can try out, google image 'half-moon manicure' for inspiration!

Thanks for reading!

What do you think of half-moon manis? What colour combinations do you like?
xo