The border manicure has been on my mental list of ‘looks to try’ for the longest time. The two main reasons why I didn’t go for it were that I couldn’t figure out how to get such thin lines around each nail and that I seemed to prefer the look on round nails. So instead I did the half border manicure, which turned out to be a pretty good compromise, even in the days when I had squoval nails. But I was still determined to do a border manicure.

The base colour looks a little blue to me in the photo but it is in fact Maybelline Cloudy Grey, which looks exactly like dry cement – the colour, that is 🙂 . After adding a base coat I applied two coats of Cloudy Grey and waited for it to dry. Then came the tricky part and part I was dreading – creating the border.

I put a splodge of Revlon Silver Screen on a piece of foil and dipped a small nail art brush into it. I then freehanded a border around each nail. I started by doing the first line at the cuticle, then joined a curved vertical line from the cuticle to the right side. So for each nail I did three lines – Cuticle, Right Side, Left Side.

I’m really pleased that I finally tried out the border manicure! It wasn’t as bad as I feared it would be and the use of cool colours brings a modern almost space age theme to mind. I see it as the cool coloured yin to the Nude Beige & Champagne yang.