DIY: Gold-Leaf Top Coat

It seems like the nail trend for the summer is more focused on texture than all of the patterns we saw in the spring. While perusing Sephora online, I saw just a few of what I am sure to be big nail hits (like a hammer, haha). One that I felt was supper cool was the gold leaf nail.

Sephora by OPI, It's Real 18K Gold Top Coat, $30

I don't know if you noticed, but that certainly does say $30 for that top coat. If you have that kind of money to spend, then great. But I don't. What I do have is a budget of $10 to recreate the look.

So here's what I used:

Sally Hansen Insta-Dri in Cleary Quick, $4; Gold/Silver Leaf bought on eBay, $6 at most for both; Revlon tweezers (1 of 2 minis) $3

 I used Sally Hansen Insta-Dri in Clearyly Quick and some gold leaf I bought on eBay for $1.29 (the silver I got for $1.05). You can use whichever you prefer, they'll work the same. You should pay no more than $3 for an ounce, especially on eBay. Otherwise you can just buy it from a craft store. I also found that I needed to use a small piece of paper rolled into a funnel and the end of a paintbrush (you can really use any pokey thing, stick like lol) to push in the gold leaf and mix it into the polish.

1. Open polish, roll piece of paper into funnel, and use tweezers to pinch gold leaf into the funnel. 

Obviously I don't care about my floor lol. Depending on how large you want the leaf to be on your nails, you may want to pull it into smaller pieces in the funnel using two tweezers. The leaf gets everywhere so avoid fans, I wasn't thinking too much about it because this was an impromptu crafting and now it's everywhere. You want to get quite a large amount in there in order to have an adequate amount come out on the brush when you're painting your nails.

2. Push in gold leaf using your chosen stick thing.

 You can use old carry-out chopsticks or the end of a paintbrush like I did. Just make sure that it can fit into the bottle and can move around in there because the next step is to

3. Leave the stick in, but remove the funnel, and stir the polish.

Once you're done, put the top back on the polish.

4. Paint your nails with your base lacquer.

I chose the 'Making Waves' color from the Sonia Kashuk 'A Powerful Punch/Mini Colour Set' that I picked up from Target for $10. I love this set because it had a lot of on-trend colors like a nude, a turquoise ^, a poppy pink, and a neon-ish orange. I love turquoise and gold together, it's very earthy and reminds me a bit of the tribal trend. Did I mention that that bold color was only from ONE COAT?!

5. Use your new gold-leaf top coat!

Oh my chubby little digis... *le sigh.* I let some pretty large pieces get into the polish as something of a surprise for when I used it. The other hand had more of the smaller size pieces.

Out of a bit of nervousness of losing this amazingly new mani, I decided to put another coat of plain clear polish. This lasted about a week. Hope you like it!