Pink Iridescent French Manicure Tutorial
Looking to elevate your french manicure technique? One of our favourite HONA nail techs, Damon Evans, has you covered in our latest nail art tutorial.
Before you start
After you've prepped the nail, you'll need to apply two coats of your favourite PureBuild (we recommend Angel, Barely There or Tender) and cure for 60 seconds. Then wipe with some IPA. This should give you a nice matte layer for drawing lines.
Then ensure you have everything else you need:
- 18mm striper brush
- Your favourite pink art gel from The Sleepover Club or That's Hot collection. (Damon has used Onesie)
- SuperShine Top Coat
Video Transcript
Hey everyone, my name is Damon and I'm gonna be doing a quick little step-by -step on how I create my Pink Iridescent French Manicure.
So, for the look today I'm gonna be using a detail paint from HONA. It is in the shade Onesie and it has a really gorgeous pink iridescent colour. For this design, I'm going to be using my 18 mm striper brush, but you can obviously use whatever brush you're most comfortable with.
Now, you want to make sure you are loading your brush up with enough product for the design. So, I usually put the brush and swirl it around in the gel and then just take off the excess on the side of the pot. You want to make sure all the bristles are nice and evenly coated. You don't want any thick gel towards the end because then when you go to do your design, you won't get a nice, perfect straight line.
When I do my French, I like to make sure that my hands are really steady by using my pinky against my clients finger as an anchor, which still gives me full range of movement during the French, which just means I have a really steady hand.
Once I've decided where I want to start my French, I always start on the left hand side anyway. I put the brush nice and firmly onto the nail and then you've just got to go for it because if you start moving around too much, you're not gonna have a nice crisp line. So, I usually place the brush down and just literally just go for it.
If I'm happy with the line I've just done then I will do the one on the bottom. So, I will start in the corner that I started the first line and then just go along with the free edge. If you're happy with what you've just done, then you can load up your brush again, and then get ready to do the right hand side.
I know everyone's got their own way of handling how they like to do their own French. But, how I do mine is, I line up from where I left off and I will swoop up towards the right hand corner. Obviously checking to make sure that I'm even but it doesn't matter too much at this point because we can go back in and correct if we need to.
Once I've done that, I will get a little bit of product on my brush and I will connect the top corner down to the bottom line. If you're going for that outline, French negative French that's really popular at the moment, then this is how you do it. We're gonna go ahead and fill it in today though.
A good tip when filling a French in is always make sure you're putting the product from the outside into the middle. Reason being if you're putting product up to the sides, it will just make the sidewalls really bulky and you're shaping off. I'm just using the leftover product on my brush, I'm not dipping back into my gel. I don't want to add too much to the nail, I don't want it to look too bulky in the end. So, I'm just manipulating the product that's already on the free edge.
The last thing you want to do before curing is just making sure there's no excess left on the sidewalls. Checking the nail from all angles, i'm making sure that it doesn't look too bulky on the edge and I haven't added too much product on the end.
At this point, before you cure, you just want to make sure you don't wanna do any last touches, if there's any bits harder than the other you can amend that now. So I'm just going to cure it now and then we'll move on to the top coat using my super shiny top coat from HONA.
Now I'm just gonna do a nice even layer all over. I spend quite a lot of time doing my top coat because I do feel like it's the most important step. You can do a lovely design but if it's full of bubbles and it's not even then it's just gonna ruin the whole thing. Make sure to cap the free edge, I'm just highlighting here there's like a little bubble in the middle of the nail. So, how I combat that is I put my brush to the side with a tiny little bit more product and I just float it up and down and doing that it will just fill in that little bubble and it will just make it perfectly smooth.
Once you've cured you are done. Thank you so much for watching the video today. It was just a quick little video on how I do my iridescent pink French. It is really good for clients who want to try something different than a white standard French but don't want to commit to anything too crazy.
Want to learn something else?
We've got lots more where that came from! Learn how to create a classic french and a micro french in our tutorial from Gaia Rose.