Real Floral Manicure | Nail of the Day

For Easter weekend I wanted to do a fun, springy manicure! I came across this Ciaté Flower Manicure kit in Bada Bloom (such a cute name!) at Winners last summer, so I decided to finally try it out! It's a kit that comes with little dried pressed flowers, a nail polish, a top coat, tweezers, and a nail file. 

To get this look, I first applied Seche Base as my base coat. Then, I applied 2 coats of a pastel blue polish. The kit came with a Ciaté pastel blue polish in Ferris Wheel, but I found that after even 3 coats of it, it was still sheer and streaky in places so I ended up using a Formula X by Sephora polish in Infatuated instead. Once the blue had dried completely, I then applied a layer of the Ciaté top coat, followed by picking up and placing 1-2 flowers onto each nail. I used the back of the tweezers to gently press them into the top coat so that they'd stick. After doing each nail like that one at a time, I applied another layer of the top coat as they recommended. Then I took the nail file from the kit and gently filed any flowers down that were hanging off the top edge of my nails to smooth the edges. Once all my nails were dry, I felt like my nails were still quite bumpy and I could feel the flowers poking up through the top coat in places. To smooth them out as much as possible, I ended up applying another layer of the Ciaté top coat, and when that wasn't enough I went in and applied Seche Vite over the top. With those 3 layers of top coat my nails were much more smoothed out.

This manicure wore better than I expected over the weekend. After 3 days of wear, the purple flowers were all still in tact, but some of the pink and blue flowers had begun wearing off. I think this is a beautiful manicure if you have an event or just want a springy manicure for a couple of days, but it's not a super long wearing one. I think in the future I'll try just applying flowers to one nail as an accent nail, that way if the flowers wear off I can just repaint that one nail to go with the rest of my manicure. It was still a fun look to wear on my nails though and I got many compliments! People seemed to be really impressed that they were actually real flowers! It's a good manicure for people who aren't very good at nail art to try too, since all you have to do is place the flowers on your nails!

I don't believe these Ciaté manicure kits are still available, but it would be super easy to achieve a look like this with dried flowers you can find elsewhere. Ebay has a ton of inexpensive ones!

Would you ever try a manicure with real flowers? What other fun nail art decorations have you tried?

Also, I'm running an Instagram giveaway and it closes tomorrow! Check it out and enter if you haven't!!