How to Embellish… A Black French Manicure (Three Ways That Work and One That Doesn’t)

A few days ago I realised that one type of mani I’ve completely neglected was the black-tipped French Manicure. Somehow that just hasn’t come up.

For this one I used OPI You’re a Doll as base colour and my Spooky Nails black liner. Sadly the latter has thickened quite a bit and I’m all out of thinner (well, I have one, but that one contains acetone and I certainly won’t use that). Thus I had some drying issues and decided to use this mani as my next ‘how to embellish’ post. And as you can see in the title, one nail looks rather bad.

• index finger: This one is good for fixing chips and tipwear. First make sure that the chip is filled with base coat and level with the remaining polish. Then cover the tip with a different colour, I chose a natural white. It looks fine by itself, but with the extra polish the tip will be a bit thick, so one way to disguise that is a simple nail sticker. Be aware that most lacy ones like the one I used are completely straight and depending on how curved your smile line is that may look odd.
• middle finger: Like the previous option, this covers chips and tipwear. Here I chose to cover the tip with a green and a blue polish and added a feathery silver line between the colours. The longer the nail the more interesting that can be. If you have a bad scratch, embedded fluff or just want any number of nails to be prettified you can add a little design. This is one seriously easy floral, similar to lilacs (and with a different stem it could just as easily be a bunch of grapes), all done with a single dotting tool.
• ring finger: I added this one for major issues, like wrinkling. A lot of the original polish is covered by the brown and gold elements. A full manicure of this would be a bit much, but just doing a gold/black/brown/gold tip one the undamaged nails would work well, I think.
• pinkie: I don’t like striping tape. It just never adheres properly (since I dislike attaching it with glue) and I can never get it where I want it. So that one is a fail, but if you’re comfortable with the stuff you can probably do a lot with it.

So there you have it. How would you embellish a black-tipped French Manicure?