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Nail Tutorials: Sideways Bows

Her Campus Placeholder Avatar Colleen Casey
Her Campus Placeholder Avatar Laura Stiles
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at CMU chapter.

I wanted to come up with a design that would look great for the holidays, but can also be used with different colors year-round.  This design is super cute and feminine any time of year!

What you’ll need:

  • Nail polish: a base color, and as many colors as you want for the bows and their centers.  I used:

              –NARS in “Candy Darling” (a pretty sheer ivory) for my base

              –Sally Hansen Diamond Strength in “Brilliant Bordeaux” and Essie in “Over the Top” for my bow colors

              –Wet ‘n Wild in 460D (a rainbow glitter in clear polish) for the bow centers.

  • A small or medium striper brush for painting the bows and details (optional:  a dotting tool for the bow centers)

How to do it:

1) Paint your base!  As always, check out my tips for getting the perfect base.

2) Using your small brush, paint two triangles that meet in the center of your nail.  Make sure the triangles are the same size!

Tip:  it’s easiest to start in the center of your nail and work outwards.  I did the top triangle first to set the width, and then matched the bottom one to it.

3) Repeat on each nail, changing colors as desired.  I made all but one nail the same color.

4) Once your triangles are dry, put a dot at the center of each nail where the triangles meet.

Tip: You can make a larger dot and add an outline, or use small jewels instead to add more style!

5) Once it’s dry, put on a top coat.

Now your nails are the perfect accessory for the holiday season. Enjoy!

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Colleen is a Creative Writing and Professional Writing double major at Carnegie Mellon University, and will be graduating in May 2014. She is currently the Director of Social Media for Her Campus CMU, and partakes in a handful of other organizations on campus. When she's not writing, she's probably reading or spending time with her residents as an RA in a freshman dorm.
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Laura Stiles is a Creative Writing, Professional Writing double major at Carnegie Mellon University who will be graduating in May 2014. In addition to being Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Carnegie Mellon chapter of HerCampus.com, she is Co-Prose Editor of The Oakland Review, Carnegie Mellon’s literary-arts journal, a manuscript reader for Carnegie Mellon University Press, and has copy-edited for Carnegie Mellon’s newspaper, The Tartan. She was also Communications and Arts Management Intern at The Hillman Center for Performing Arts in summer 2012, and is ecstatic to be studying abroad in Sheffield, England in spring 2013. In her free time, she enjoys singing along to music on long car rides, spontaneously kicking off her shoes to explore lakes and creeks, and curling up with a soft blanket and a captivating book. She was also recently pleasantly surprised to discover that she has a taste for sushi.