DIY: Custom Striping Brush

If you don't want to drop $8 on a tiny tube of nail art polish, here's a super cheap (free) and easy way to make striping brushes out of your old nail polish.

You will need:
A bottle of old nail polish (that you do not use anymore)
Nail polish remover
Paper towels
Scissors

Step #1:

Take a bottle of nail polish that you no longer use. (I am using this bottle of white nail polish that is too thick and chunky to use anymore.) Take the cap/brush off and wipe the excess nail polish off with a paper towel. Before it starts to dry, clean the bristles carefully with nail polish remover. I like to fill the cap of the NPR with it and soak the brush for a few seconds, swirl it around until the color comes out.

Wipe the brush clean with a paper towel or cotton ball to dry. Note: all nail polish brushes are different! If you clean the brush off too roughly, you could easily pull the bristles out! So be careful if this is your first time; the brushes are sometimes very fragile.

Step #2:
Using your fingers, carefully split the bristles into two sections: a section that you want to keep, and a section that you are going to remove. I have split off roughly 15-20 bristles here that I want to keep. The less bristles you have, the thinner the stripes will be.

Step #3:
Use scissors to carefully cut off the sectioned you have decided to remove. Cut as close to the base of the brush as possible. If you are afraid to cut off too much, I would say just cut off half the bristles; you can always remove more later.

Step #4:
Test out your new custom made striping brush!! I drop a few dots of nail polish on a piece of paper and dip my brush in it to apply.

This is a really great way to make use of your retired nail polish, especially if you (like myself) have a problem throwing things away. Also, you can make them as thick or as thin as you want so you have just the right striping brush for you. You don't have to be a slave to the nail art polishes anymore. Hope this helps, and thanks for following!

Pretty Pretty Flower Nails

This "Blue Calypso" base color by Sally Hansen has a coat of Sally Hansen HD "Blu" on top and I am IN LOVE with it! I painted on these really cute flowers on a few of my nails and a few simple stripes on the rest. I will do a tutorial on how to do these flowers ON REQUEST... they are really easy, they just take a little patience. So if anyone needs to knw how to do the flowers, just comment below and I'll post a tutorial. I'm so bad, I get a few people asking me HOW to do my designs, but I promise I will start posting tutorials, but only if people ask nicely. :) Anyways, I just did an asymetrical blue tip, and these pretty flowers! It's too bad I did 2 girls right after I did my nails and they were ruined by the end of the night. I would have kept them on longer, but good thing I snapped a photo!

Crazy Ass Nails OMG

I just got a little carried away with my nails and I'm not even going to explain how I did these. My nails apparently DID NOT enjoy this design; THREE of my acrylic nails broke or fell off RIGHT AFTER I did this. Do not attempt this design: very bad luck!

ADORABLE Rainbow Polkadotted Tips :)

Rainbows are not usually my kind of thing, but surprisingly I kept this set on longer than 1 day! I had it on for a full 2 days, and that's something. They are just SO cute! I painted on pink, orange, yellow, green, and blue French tips, and used my dotting tool to carefully make large white dots on top (and of course a good think layer of my go-to glitter top coat.) The following colors were used in this design:

NYC "Pink Promenade Creme"

MilaniNEON "Awesome Orange"

Sally Hansen Instant Dry "Lightening"

Wet N Wild "Green with Envy"

Sally Hansen Complete Manicure "Blue Calypso"

This is a simple, but very cute design that really doesn't require much talent, just a steady hand.

South park! <3

South Park kids! This took forevs to do, and when I was done, it looked to weird I just had to take a picture and then take them off! Enjoi anyways! ;)

Got grapes?

I had to take one of these pictures with a flash because you couldnt really see the design but I sorta warped the colors... This was just a fast asymetrical tip design I did when I was to lazy and lacking creativity. I don't even like the color purple anyways; it's a good thing I did this particular design because my roomate caught a glimpse of these and had me do an almost identical version on her. The lighter of the purple is Nicole by OPI's "Virtuous Violet" and the darker is "Purple Pizzazz" by Sally Hansen Hard as Nails. I used my dotting tool to line the seam between the two purps. Got graaapes?

New green tips!

The lighter green on the tips is from my new stash, its "Big Money Frost" by NYC, underneath it is "Carribean Frost" by Wet N Wild. I did a layered asymetrical tip with black stripes coming from one corner. I'm going to call that kind of a design a "burst" until I can figure out another word that describes it. Anyways, I made the bursts black with my striping brush and on a few of them I painted a light coat of glitter just on top of the burst and coming out on to the ends of the stripes. It looked really cool in the sunlight, but not sure if you can see it in the pictures.