Year of the Dragon

If you’ve seen my other Chinese New Year nail art designs, you’ll know that I like to bring out my longer falsies for this particular holiday. (And for some reason I favor shorter falsies for the end of December one…huh…) This year I kept my classically colored red/black/gold set very simple using only stickers and one simple stamp to accent the nails, but I’m not listing this under the simple nail art tag because I don’t think applying gold foil would be considered simple if you were just getting into nail art. However, if you wanted to copy this design, you could just use a simple gold polish instead of the foil. I mostly did it because it matched the gold of the stickers better.

I really can’t tell you why I went with stickers since I actually have so many stamping plates with images of dragons and I have already painted my second mani for this in the lucky colors and didn’t really use them either. This may just be a year where dragons keep popping up. We’ll see.

Chinese New Year nail art for the Year of the Dragon w/holographic gold foil, black/red polish, gold nail stickers + a stamped dragon symbol. — Year of the Dragon

Flipside stamping

I kept the outward design simple, but I just had to sneak in some flipside stamping. In gold, of course.

Nail art products used

Flipside Stamping:: Maniology’s “Lost Gold“
Base Polishes:: Maniology’s “Lost Gold“, Revlon’s Parfumerie “Espresso“, and Zoya’s “Isla“
Stamping Polish:: UberChic Beauty’s “Pure Black“
Nail Foil:: Gold metallic holographic nail foil by Maniology applied on top of the gold polish.
Stamping Plate:
Nail Stickers:: Gold metallic stickers of Chinese dragons.
Stamping Plate:: Moyou London “Zodiac Collection 17” (year of the dragon symbol with Chinese dragon)

Items in italics are debuting on the blog for the first time.

Zoya’s “Isla” continues to be an absolutely gorgeous choice for red. It’s a little bit deep and super shimmery. Really, I have so many red polishes that I love that it’s kinda hard to choose which one to highlight. I even had a new red shade I’d purchased and needed to use, but I wanted something shimmery and sophisticated, which it was not.

Meanwhile, my bottle of Revlon’s “Espresso” is in terrible condition. I am probably going to have to downgrade it to only filling in reverse stamping because it was lumpy and only a good top coat mostly fixed it. How strange to have so much nail polish and not have a single good plain black creme that is not for stamping… 😂