Shamrock Mani Monday

Hello and welcome to this week's edition of Mani Monday! This time I remembered there was a holiday of sorts coming up and I planned accordingly. Gold star for me! This week I'll be teaching you how to do some three leaf clover nail art, which when topped with gold glitter makes for a perfect St Patrick's Day manicure. So let's get started shall we?

To do this manicure you will need:

• White nail polish for the base color. I'm using Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in White On
• Green polish, obviously. I'm using another Sally Hansen polish, this time an Inst-Dri in I-rush Luck. How perfect is that?
• Gold glitter polish. I'm using an ELF one called Gold Star, which has both large and small bits of gold glitter in it.
• Clear top coat. I'm using my new Ulta brand one.
• Small paint brush
• Nail polish remover to clean up your edges and q-tips

First, paint you base coat. I only needed two coat surprisingly, but you may need 3 or 4 depending on what brand you are using. Just get it as smooth and opaque as possible. Let dry completely before moving onto the next step.

Now comes the fun part, the actual nail art. I find it easiest to put a blob of my nail art color on a piece of paper and dip my paint brush into that. 3 leaf clovers, or shamrocks, have 3-4 tear shaped leaves. We'll be doing 3 leaves for simplicity. First near the base of your nail, paint in a smallish circle. Then drag the bottom down just a bit towards the tip of your nail. Don't worry if it is a little off, you can adjust it later as needed.

Now do another smallish circle off to one side, then drag it into where the point from the first circle is. You should now have two tear drops connected via their points.

Add in the last dot on the other side and drag the point in to meet the other two. Now is your chance to even them up if you need too. It should just look like three fat tear drops connected together.

Lastly, the stem. From where the three points meet, paint a slightly curved line downwards and off to one side. You can widen out the end of it if you want, I did on one of mine and didn't on the other one and you can't really tell the difference. Now let the whole clover dry before you do anything else to it. If you want you can add a clover to another finger while this one dries.

Once all your nails are dry, paint on a layer or two of the gold glitter polish. I did two coats per nail. Let this dry completely, then put on your top coat, clean up your edges, and show the world your adorable new manicure!