Cheeky Monkey Nails!

After buying two new Catrice Cosmetics Ultimate Nail Lacquers I decided to do a manicure with my new purchases! I actually really recommend Catrice nail polishes to anybody. They are €2.45 each in Penneys stores across the country. Catrice polishes are the best for those of us that want all the colours just because, who knows, you may one day need them! I personally love Catrice polishes because they are cheap, come in a huge variety of colours, paint on thick and pigmented while lasting a good week on my nails sans chips!

I bought two colours on my last trip into Penneys, 700 Birdy Reloaded! (a bright yellow colour with a slight shimmer to it) and 720 Bruno Brownani (a deep, dark brown colour). Both of these colours go on smooth and a little thick. The yellow bottle suggests using two coats for best coverage but I honestly find that with these colours, more often than not one coat does a perfect job!

                                                      

For this manicure you'll also need a dotting tool and a striper brush which I talked about in this blog post. On top of those you'll also need nail polish colours in a lighter brown (I used Gosh 596 Miss Mole), white and black.

First we'll look at the banana nails:

Paint your index, middle and pinky fingers with your yellow nail polish

Once the yellow has dried take a striper brush and dip it in back paint. Here we are going to paint small black outlines of bananas starting from the nail bed and reaching out to the tips of your nails.

As you can see here, I am not that great at drawing bananas, but it's okay it's supposed to look a little more abstract than your average banana as it's just black outlines on a yellow base. Paint as many or as few as you want, I liked to paint some bananas curving in the opposite direction to the others but again, it's up to you how you want them to look.

Next up are your monkey nails! These are surprisingly easy to do and look really cute, plus they only take five minutes from start to finish. Firstly you need to take your dark brown and paint almost all of your thumb and ring fingernails with it, leave an arc of your natural nail unpainted at your nail bed, as you can see below. Then I want you to paint your lighter brown in an arc again from about half way down your nail like so.

Next we'll create the monkeys ears. Take your dotting tool and dip it in dark brown paint, dot it on either side of the dark brown arc. Then pick a smaller sized dotting tool and dip it in your lighter brown. Dot this light brown circle within the two small dark brown circles and voilà you have cute monkey ears!

Now for the finishing touches that are going to take this oddly shaped brown blob and turn it into your cute monkey design! The eyes are simple, take your largest dotting tool and dip it in white nail polish. Dot the white in two circles, close to each other at the centre of the light brown arc. Take a smaller dotting tool and dip it in black. Once the white has dried dot a small black pupil inside each eye. The nostrils are just a little below the eyes. You take your smallest dotting tool and dip it into your black once more. Then you just place two small dots beneath the eyes and you have painted your little monkey.

Simple, right? Obviously you can use different colours, go crazy! Have purple and blue monkeys on your nails, they are your nails after all! Once you've done the above steps just make sure to use a good top coat to keep your nail design protected.

Here is a photo of how this design turned out on me. I really enjoyed doing this manicure as it's super easy and not at all time consuming. The best part of all was that I didn't need to spend a fortune on lots of different expensive nail polishes!