My Weekend Manicure: Cupcakes!

As most of you already know, the weekends are when I like to cut loose and do something fun with my manicures. For this weekend, I finally decided to take the plunge and do a Cupcake Manicure. I saw a cute pic of one of these manicures a while back, but it wasn't until I actually did some research that I found out that the Cupcake Manicure is a "thing", meaning it's a quite established manicure and there are a zillion variations out there (seriously, do a Google image search for "cupcake manicure" and you'll be blown away by all the adorable designs).

To get the basic gist of this manicure, check out this video tutorial. This will give you the foundation of how to do it, but keep in mind that there are a multitude of variations/modifications out there, and for my mani I really wanted to incorporate some nail jewels (remember the Fing'rs jewels I picked up recently? This manicure is the sole reason why I bought them!).

Items used for this manicure:

• Fing'rs Flirt Nail & Body Jewels for the "sprinkles" (optional)
• Base color (Milani Orchidia)
• Cupcake sleeve color (Zoya Kimber)
• Cupcake sleeve stripe color (L.A. Colors Art Deco Nail Art Lacquer in White)
• Cupcake frosting color (Wet n Wild French White Creme)
• Dotting tool from the L.A. Colors Polka Dot Kit (optional)

Wanna see how it turned out? Keep reading...

Not bad for my very first attempt, right?

Some things I learned along the way:

• The actually manicure itself takes very little time to execute. It's the part prior to the manicure that's time-consuming, because you have to decide which colors you want to use for the cupcake components, as well as which base color you want to use. And then you have to decide on a design for the rest of your nails (stripes, polka dots or...?).

• Try to pick a color for your cupcake sleeve that will be a sharp contrast to your base color, or else it might get lost in the overall design. Also, pick a color that only requires one coat, so that you don't have to apply multiple coats for the sleeve (that will take a long time to dry, and that area needs to be fully dry before you apply the stripes).

• If you don't have a dotting tool, don't worry! You can still totally do this. In fact, I forgot to use my dotting tool to create the frosting on the cupcake and I did it freehand using only the brush that comes with WnW French White Creme. Just take your time and use the brush to create the little "mounds" of frosting. It's much easier than it sounds. And you don't have to do polka dots on the rest of your nails--you can do a solid base color with a glitter top coat and then use the same glitter top coat on top of your cupcake frosting. The possibilities are endless!

• If you're going to use nail jewels for the cupcake sprinkles, be sure to have a pair of tweezers on hand (makes it much easier to apply the glue to the back of the jewel and also to apply the jewel to your nail). Also, make sure that your "frosting" color is about 75% dry before you apply the jewels. You want the polish to still be a bit tacky so that it will give the jewels some extra "stick". If you apply the jewels to wet polish, the jewels will slosh all around the place and ruin the design.

• Be sure that you test out the color you're going to use for the stripes on the cupcake sleeve prior to your manicure. I tried several combinations before I settled on this one, because some of the nail art stripers I own have weaker pigmentation and ended up looking really weak on top of Zoya Kimber. In fact, as you can see in my pics, the L.A. Colors Art Deco polish in White doesn't look like a crisp white against Zoya Kimber, but I still thought it was cute so that's why I used it.

• When you're done, be sure to slap a layer of clear top coat on top of all your nails, just to lock everything into place.

I hope this post was helpful to you if you've been thinking about trying a Cupcake Manicure. I'd love to hear from you if try it (or if you already have!). Any additional tips you can give us?

Some of the products featured in this post were given to Nouveau Cheap for previous reviews.