How To Paint Your Nails Perfectly Every Time

We've all been there. You go to paint your nails, and polish floods your cuticles. You attempt to clean your cuticles with a cotton swab while the polish is still wet. However, all it did was spread the polish all over your fingers and now there are strings of cotton in your polish. Have no fear—these tips and tricks will help you to paint your nails PERFECTLY every time. However, practice makes perfect and if you aren't successful—you will be in no time!

1. Don't Overload Your Brush

For average sized nails, I recommend brushing off one side of the brush with the lip of the bottle. Then do the same to the other side, but only half way this time. Twenty-five percent of your brush should now have polish on it. This creates a small drop of polish on the tip of the brush. If you follow my instagram, @gloomy.nails, then you've likely noticed that I have larger nail beds than the average person. For this reason, I only wipe one side of my brush off while painting my thumb nails. Deciding how to load your brush really depends on the length and width of your nails.

2. Use a Detail Brush to Avoid Cuticle Floods

If you're scared of flooding your cuticles then I recommend painting further from the edges of your nail. Mostly just painting the nail plate and the free edge (you can search nail anatomy to see where these parts are if you're unsure). After painting those parts of your nails, grab a detail brush, and carefully paint the edges of your nail near the cuticle and the lateral nail fold. This technique works best if you do this on the first coat then add a second, smoother coat. However, I believe it would work best with gel polish rather than regular because gel polish doesn't show brush strokes!

3. Don't Clean Up with Cotton Swabs

I understand it can be frustrating that even after taking my advice you're cuticles end up flooded. Just relax, take a chill pill, and practice. You have a couple of options here, and one of them is starting over again. It can help you learn from your previous mistakes. However, it can be very time consuming. A lot of people might reach to a cotton swab right away—but that's the worst possible solution. Reaching for anything that is cotton will get your freshly polished nails covered in fibres, and you will be forced to start all over again. I recommend cleaning up with a cleanup brush soaked in acetone, but not drenched. Overloading your brush with acetone will cause more flooding of the cuticles and that's exactly what you want to avoid. Another option is while the polish is still wet, use your thumbnail on your other hand to clean up the mess.

That's it for my do's and don'ts of painting your nails perfectly! I hope you learned a thing or two from this blog post, and as always happy painting!