St Patrick's Day Gold Leaf Nail Art!

We don't really celebrate St Patty's Day here, but hey, give me any reason to wear green nail polish and I'll be all over it! By chance I also happen to have some real gold leaf on hand, so I decided to use it for my nails - after all, what's St Patrick's Day without a pot of gold?

The gold leaf was actually supposed to be used for cooking (you know, like decorating food), but obviously gold foil nail art is so much more fun :p The green nail polish is ASOS Paints by Ciate in Pixie. For this nail art, I just painted two coats of ASOS Pixie, and then layered the gold leaf on top.



Since the gold leaf is quite thin, I used tweezers to handle it. I didn't want to cover my entire nail with gold foil although that would have been cool (gotta leave some for the food), so I did a diagonal design instead. For me the challenge was getting the gold leaf pieces that were the right shape and size onto the nail. Sometimes I had to tear bigger pieces apart too, to get smaller ones that fit better on my nail.



I actually thought of doing something more St Patrick's Day-ish, like do a four-leaf clover or something, but I figured out that it would probably be better to just let the gold leaf shine on its own. I didn't want to overcrowd my nails!



Anyway, I really like how my nails look right now. I love that the gold foil really adds some bling to my nails, and is really nicely offset by the green. I'm not sure if you can fully see the effect in these photos, but in real life, it looks absolutely amazing. I'll totally need to try out gold leaf with other combinations (glitter polish? A darker base, e.g. black?), but for now, this makes me happy!