14 Simple Designs for Nail Art You Can Make at Home
It’s not really that simple to locate simple nail designs that you can replicate at home, despite what Pinterest and YouTube tutorials have attempted to convince you of. The average individual has undoubtedly struggled at some point to swipe on a single shade of polish without putting it all over their cuticles, let alone free-handing any kind of nail art design. And it’s really unfortunate if you enjoy having intricate nails so much. Like everyone else, we adore going to the nail salon, but even a single monthly manicure plus the added expense of nail art may seriously strain most people’s finances.
Painting your own nails at home may seem next to impossible, but luckily, there are some nail designs out there that pretty much anyone can nail (see what we did there?) sans years of experience and training. That said, we went scouring the Internet to find 14 of the easiest nail designs brought into existence and decided to put them all in one place. Keep scrolling to find a plethora of easy nail designs that make the prospects of at-home nail art feel a lot less scary.
Delightful Dots
There’s a good chance that every time you take a bobby pin out of your hair, you leave it on your bathroom counter, and it ends up getting knocked onto the floor, never to be seen again. Instead, pull its two prongs as far apart as you can and turn it into a makeshift nail polish dotting tool.
You can dip one of its beaded ends into your nail polish bottle until it’s lightly coated, then use that to gently place polish onto your nail dot by dot. Allure news editor Nicola Dall’Asen showed how it’s done in the photo shown above with an almond-shaped set of fake nails from Static Nails and Essie Neutrals Nail Polish in Licorice.
ESSIE
Essie Neutrals Nail Polish in Licorice
New York City-based nail artist Miss Pop has a similar hack for dots using a tailor’s pin. She pushes the pointed tip into an eraser for a better grip, then dips the rounded head of the pin into nail polish. She says bobby pins are effective, but her method creates bigger dots if that’s the look you’re after. “Bobby pins are cool, but they only do tiny dots,” says Miss Pop. “This will give you a real polka.”
Do not get impatient when waiting for those dots to dry, by the way. If they’re even slightly wet when you paint on your topcoat, they’ll smear everywhere and all that hard work will be ruined. This goes for all nail-art tricks in general, and that’s why you may want to consider trying fake nails. With a set of press-ons, you can paint your designs, then go about your day while they dry down. When they’re finished, just glue them on and go.
Wonderful Watercolors
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It is quite possible to turn each of your nails into a watercolor masterpiece, per this beautiful manicure by Amy Tan. Tan tells Allure that she mixed her color polishes “with a few blobs of clear polish and paint[ed] them on loosely to achieve that watercolor effect.” However, before swiping the polish across your nails, she suggests testing the polishes’ opacity on a piece of paper.
As for the nails’ gilded accents, reach for a gold polish to mimic the appearance of fancy gold foil “and paint on a few ‘swooshes’ to accent your mani.” Tan admits that she used gel polishes for this design, but she says that regular polishes would work just as well to create “a similar effect.”
Nifty Neon Tips
You know those donut-shaped stickers you used to use in school to repair your hole-punched paper when it ripped and fell out of your binder? Turns out those little stickies are a very valuable nail-art tool when making these French manicure-inspired neon tips. You might already have some lying around if you are or live with a student. Otherwise, you can pick them up for a few bucks at your local office supply store.
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To create these bright neon nails, start off with a set of neutral-colored press-ons. Dall’Asen used some from Kiss, but you can totally use your bare, natural nails as a base or paint them a different color first. Lay one sticker across each nail near the very top, then try to make all the spacing even before painting the tips with two coats of lime-green nail polish by MiniLuxe. The neon-green polish that Dall’Asen used for this design has been discontinued, but KB Shimmer’s Easy Glowing Nail Polish comes pretty close to it. Before the second coat dries down, reach for some tweezers to pull off the stickers as smoothly as possible.
If you want to get even more customizable, Miss Pop advises picking up some blue painter’s tape from a hardware store. “It doesn’t leave a sticky residue and you can cut it into shapes,” she says. “Apply it directly to the nail, then add your base and color coats around it. Lift the tape when the polish isn’t completely dry but also isn’t wet to the touch.”
Random Doodles
The daydreaming doodles you’ve drawn on the margins of your notebook page can actually serve as inspiration for your at-home manicure, as demonstrated by nail artist Kate Bonar. To take your doodles to your nails, Bonar advises finding a “high-pigmented color for the design to make sure it pops” and using a fine-tipped brush, like Nails Luxe’s Brush H, which she used to paint the doodles on each nail. Lastly, she emphasizes checking that the design is 100 percent dry “before sealing [it] in with topcoat to ensure no smudges.”
