How To Do Foil Manicures The Easy Way – A Pictorial

Hi there! Today’s post is about how to do foil manis. It’s super easy! See it for yourself!

1 Paint your nails. Any normal polish and colour will do. Avoid quick-dry formulas.

2 Wait for your nails to dry. Once the polish is dry to the touch but still tacky (you need to be able to leave a fingerprint), it’s the perfect base for a scattered foil mani.

3 Press a piece of foil onto your nail. Try to “rub on” the foil gently. Then rip it off – like a plaster. Don’t try to pull off the foil gently as it will take the polish with it. If this happens, don’t panic. Just reapply the polish, wait for it to dry, and try again.

4 Repeat as needed / wanted. 🙂 Use different colours if you want… the possibilities are endless!

5 Once you feel your nail is all foiled up (yeah, I just made that up), your work is almost done. Don’t worry about fingerprints, they’re part of the process. 🙂

6 Apply 1 coat of normal clear polish or top coat as this will make your nails look and feel 100% smooth (bye-bye fingerprints) and glossy within seconds. Avoid quick-dry formulas as they will shrink the foils (which isn’t a good look at all). You can achieve 2 finishes – see the tips and tricks section below!

Now your work is literally done! How easy is this?! I’ve done foil nails for many years. Back then all I had was polish and foils, but none of the “tools” they say you need. But guess what, I didn’t need any of the tools, and it took me 5 minutes to figure out how to do foil manis using polish and foils only. And you can do it too!

On to the tips and tricks!

With this simple method you can achieve 2 finishes – the scattered foil mani (pics 1 and 3 above) and a more “galaxy” kind of foil mani (pic 2 above). For the first look, just apply your top coat as you normally would. For the second look, apply your top coat in a slow, dragging motion, so that the nail polish brush will drag the foil particles all over your nails. 🙂

Again, don’t use any quick dry formulas. You can’t work with quick-dry base colours because the foils need to stick to a tacky surface, and you can’t use quick-dry top coats because they will literally distort the foils underneath.

Don’t buy too many foils. I know that, when you start to use foils, it’s tempting to buy way more foils than you need. Don’t. Just don’t. Start with a set of 30 strips of 10cmx4cm foils with different colours and designs, and start to practise with whatever foil you think is the ugliest. That way you won’t feel too bad about wasting product if things don’t work out 100% the first time. 🙂

If you’re not sure what and where to buy, I would recommend this particular set of foils for £1.99. This set is cheap, but it will give you a number of different foils to play with. I’ve bought a lot (!) of stuff from this ebay seller over several years – foils, decals, glitter, buttons, etc, and I’ve always been 100% happy.

There’s one more thing. Don’t ever throw away any leftover foil. I promise you that you will make the most beautiful manis or accent nails using leftover foils. In the pic below you see a piece of a large 20cmx20cm piece of foil. I used this exact “leftover” piece to make a number of awesome manis, such as this one and next Wednesday’s foil mani (you have to patient).

So what are you waiting for? If you’d like to try nail foils, let me know. I’d love to see your creations. Keep in mind, all you need is a starter kit consisting of at least 1 clear drugstore polish (which can work as a base too if you only want colourful foil accents) and a couple of cheap foils. Again, what are you waiting for?! 🙂

Mrs Strawberry Blonde