Retro nails for a day

A found a 1940s tutorial for a manicure. It seemed so ingenious, I just had to try it out!

It's pretty simple: basically a half-moon manicure with french tips, over almond-shaped nails. You leave the moons and tips bare and paint the remainder red.

The genius of this technique is that it would really stretch out your wear: bare tips means no tipwear, obviously, and bare moons means that the gap from your nails growing out would be less evident. You could probably wear a manicure like this for a week or longer if you were careful.

Now my tips aren't very white and I don't even have moons, so I played with this look a little bit. I filed my nails into almond shapes (which took forever), and started with a base of sheer white - in this case, a doubled-up coat of my sheer white basecoat.

Since I was wearing polish under the red, I couldn't take advantage of the trick the article offers for perfect tips: simply wipe away the red polish in a neat line. Instead, I had to freehand it. I'm not very good at this, as you can tell. To boot, if you examine the pictures you'll notice that a second person is meant to be painting your nails, not you yourself. So my lines didn't come out great.

Ashamed at my shoddy drawing skills, I put a layer of sparkly white over it to distract (Satin Sheets from Revlon's Sweet Nothings collection)

So I didn't love this manicure. It would probably have looked better if I had steadier hands, my nails were longer and not stained, and if the red weren't so bright. But still, it was fun and fascinating to do the kind of manicure my grandmother might have done. What a clever technique to extend the wear of your polish.

Nailgirl