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Monday 17 October 2016

Halloween 3D Acrylic Skull Designs - Naio Nails Tutorial





In this video,  Kirsty shows off some Halloween designs using acrylic to make 3D skulls, she does two different designs, using the same method.




This channel combines Kirsty Meakin's experience in the nail industry and Naio Nails fantastic product range which is nearly all available world wide.


We attempt to give you an entertaining look at the kind of techniques you can use as a nail technician of as someone just doing nails for yourself or even just for fun.



To complete this tutorial you will need the following products

Clear Acrylic Powder - http://bit.ly/1UhW386
Sapphire Satin Acrylic Powder - http://bit.ly/2dCXUHp
Mega White Acrylic Powder - http://bit.ly/2eg0DFj
Naio Nials Mylar Collection - http://bit.ly/2bw1wVF
Polycolor Acrylic Paint Collection - http://bit.ly/2c6AZhE
Metallic Gold Acrylic Powder - http://bit.ly/1rcWqDS
Primary Red Acrylic Powder - http://bit.ly/1XK8B5T
Matte UV/LED Top Coat - http://bit.ly/1srqpck
Caviar Microbead Collection - http://bit.ly/2dXfaGV

This channel combines Kirsty Meakin's experience in the nail industry and Naio Nails fantastic product range which is nearly all available world wide.

We attempt to give you an entertaining look at the kind of techniques you can use as a nail technician of as someone just doing nails for yourself or even just for fun.

In this series of videos, Kirsty is going to show you how to masterfully create 3D fruit, using acrylic powders.

She also shows some gel paints from the new Naio range

in this video the following products were used

Gel Paints - Coming Soon

120ml - Pure Acetone - Acrylic Nail Remover- http://bit.ly/1SrWpss
White Sanding Block - http://bit.ly/1XJHaZZ
Cracked Ice Mylar Light Green - http://bit.ly/2bbCL3X
UV/LED Cure Quick Finish Mega Gloss Sealer Gel 15ml - http://bit.ly/22C1Ne2
120ml High Speed Blue Acrylic Liquidhttp://bit.ly/1RxqqH2
Rain Forest, Acrylic Powder - http://bit.ly/25LXYVh
Secondary Green Acrylic Powder- http://bit.ly/1t8xdMk
Caribbean sunsplash Acrylic powder - http://bit.ly/2b5vBis
Soft Pastel lemon Acrylic Powder- http://bit.ly/1UEtEGI
Palm Leaves Arcylic Powder - http://bit.ly/2axrlrs
Platinum White Polycolor Acrylic Nail Art Paint 20ml -http://bit.ly/1pH8AVQ
Brilliant Green Deep Polycolor Acrylic Nail Art Paint 20ml - http://bit.ly/1qfWUsu
8g Brush-on Nail Glue - http://bit.ly/1RMXefl
Cuticle Oil -http://bit.ly/1RoQUZg


This is the final Halloween video in  this series,  Kirsty does something that she absolutely loves,  Dia de los Muertos (you have no idea how long it took to get that right)  Day of the Dead.

This channel combines Kirsty Meakins experience in the nail industry and Naio Nails fantastic product range which is nearly all available world wide.

We attempt to give you an entertaining look at the kind of techniques you can use as a nail technician of as someone just doing nails for yourself or even just for fun.

For this tutorial you will need the following items:-

Bad Influence Gel Polish -http://bit.ly/2d5xc3L
Sapphire Satin Acrylic Powder -http://bit.ly/2dCXUHp
Pure Purple Acrylic Powder
Passionate Purple Acrylic Powder -http://bit.ly/1W6i6zb
Primary Red Acrylic Powder - http://bit.ly/1XK8B5T
Toxic Apple Acrylic Powder -http://bit.ly/1Xa7108

Websites:
UK-English www.naio-nails.co.uk
US-English www.naio-nails.us
Europe www.naio-nails.eu
France www.naio-nails.fr

Facebook: www.facebook.com/NaioNailsUK

Twitter: www.twitter.com/naionailsuk

Instagram: www.instagram.com/naionailsuk
Google+  https://plus.google.com/u/0/+naiouk

Friday 23 September 2016

Beginners Guide to Applying Acrylic Nails

So you've had your nails done for you for years, or you're just curious, but you're wanting to try doing them yourself. It might look simple when your watching a trained nail technician, but it will take time and patience to learn how to do acrylics correctly and fast.

These are the products you will need:
  • Cuticle Remover
  • Cuticle Pusher
  • Buffing Block
  • Nail File
  • Nail Prep/Dehydrator
  • Acid Free Nail Primer
  • Dappen Dish
  • Acrylic Nail Brush
  • Lint Free Wipes
  • Acrylic Powder 
  • Acrylic Liquid (we recommend Medium Speed for beginners as you have a slower drying time)
  • Top Coat (either Air Dry Top Coat or Mega Gloss or Matt Top Coat)
  • Nail Tips (optional)
  • Nail Glue (optional)
  • Pure Acetone (optional)
  • Cuticle Oil (optional)
  • Pinching Tool (optional)
  • Manicure Brush (optional)

First you will need to master prepping the nail!

1) Apply Cuticle Remover to the cuticle area of your nail and using a Cuticle Pusher, push the cuticle back ensuring no cuticle is on the nail bed (as the acrylic will not stick to it) and wipe the nail clean with a tissue when finished.
2) Use a Buffing Block to remove all shine to the nail by softly swiping left and right over the entire nail bed.
3) Remove dust either with a dry tissue or Manicure Brush.
If you are wanting to apply a nail tip: (if not, continue to Step 9)

4) Pick out the correct size nail tips that fit your nail snugly and lay them out ready.
5) Apply a small amount of Nail Glue to the nail tip where it will meet your natural nail bed.
6) Press and hold the nail tip (with nail glue on) firmly to the nail for about 10 seconds or until you can feel the tip has stuck.
7) Using Nail Tip Cutters or Nail scissors (trickier to use), cut/snip the nail tip to your desired length.
8) File down the nail tip to the shape you would like (e.g almond, square, coffin, etc) by moving the nail file back and forth on the side walls (side of the nail), and on the tip and the underside of the nail.
(If the nail tip hasn't blended with your natural nail and you can feel a ridge; get a Lint Free Pad and apply a small amount of Pure Acetone to it. Wipe the pad side to side over the join between the nail tip and your natural nail to make the tip blend in with your nail).
9) Apply Nail Prep/Dehydrator to the entire nail bed (wait a few seconds before going onto the next step).
10) Apply Acid Free Nail Primer to the entire nail bed.
Now comes the harder part; applying the acrylic!
1) Pour your Acrylic Liquid into your Dappen Dish.
2) Dip the Acrylic Brush into the Dappen Dish and push the brush tip to the bottom of the Dappen Dish to get the air bubbles out.
3) Swipe the brush on the edge of the Dappen dish once to get the excess liquid off.
4) Dip the brush tip into the Acrylic Powder and stroke the brush through the powder towards you until you create a ball of acrylic (it should look like a tiny golf ball- if the ball is too wet or dry start again).
5) Press the brush (with acrylic powder ball on) to a lint free pad to drain the excess liquid off.
6) Apply the ball of acrylic to the top of the nail (near the cuticle) and bring the bead down to the very tip.
7) Sculpt the acrylic by pressing the brush flat to your nail and gently moving the acrylic to smooth out bumps and to spread it out evenly (remember to keep your brush clean by dipping it into the acrylic liquid while doing this).
8) If you need more acrylic to cover the entire nail, repeat steps 2-7 until your happy with the coverage of the nail.

Using a Pinching Tool: (if you don't want to, proceed to Step 9)After you have practiced doing acrylic for a while or are confident doing basic acrylics; you can use a Pinching Tool on the nail to make the nail longer, more slender, and to make a stronger C curve- which will make the nail stronger.
1) When the acrylic is still drying (but it doesn't feel tacky) place the Pinching Tool on the nail like a clamp (move the tool further down the nail if it's pinching too hard and it will pinch a little less). 
If you want it to pinch really narrow then use the bottom end of the pinching tool.

2) Leave on for about 3 minutes.
3) Tap the nail to see if it makes a ting sound (if not, leave it on a bit longer) and then remove the pinching tool by squeezing the sides apart.
Now move on to Step 10.

9) Wait a little over 2 minutes for the acrylic to dry (it should ting when you tap it- when it's not dry it will sound hollow).
10) File the entire nail until it is smooth on the top and round the edges and to make the shape more defined. (The higher the grit count on the Nail File, the smoother the file. i.e 240/240 is smoother than a 80/80 nail file).
11) Now you need to add a top coat to seal in the acrylic. The two steps below show 2 ways of doing this:
If you DON'T have a lamp to dry your acrylics:        - Apply Air Dry Top Coat to you entire nail and leave to dry for about 2 minutes.

If you DO have a lamp:
- Apply Mega Gloss or Matt Top Coat (depending on which finish you want).
- Put your hand under the lamp and turn on.
- Leave to cure (dry) for 2 minutes under an UV lamp (or 1 minute for a LED lamp).
- When the time is up, remove your hand.
12) Finish off the look by adding a stroke of Cuticle Oil (in your chose scent) to the cuticle area of each nail. Rub in with your fingers.

DONE!

Enjoy your new acrylic nails and be proud that you did it all yourself! GO YOU!

Acrylic nails will usually last 2-3 weeks then you can either remove them (see our 'How to Remove Safely Acrylic Nails' blog post) or infill them (see our 'How to do infills on Acrylic Nails' blog post).

Thanks for Reading!
 For a video showing you how to do this, follow this link: Naio YouTube Channel

Monday 8 August 2016

Nail Video Tutorials

To see the latest nail trends and nail art from our talented Kirsty Meakin, go to our YouTube page:
https://www.youtube.com/naiouk

We add a new video every weekday (Monday-Friday) around 3pm GMT :)

Subscribe & Like to keep up to date and show some love <3 span="">

If you film any hauls of our products or nail art using our products, make sure to let us know and we will add it to our Public playlist 'Customer Hauls, Reviews & Nail art!'

Our subscriber count is over 700,000 and we would love you to join our online family!

Love the Naio Nails Team
x

Nail Shapes Explanation

Here we have a selection of videos to demonstrate the different acrylic nail shapes.


In this video we show you the ballerina, stiletto, competition nails and edge shaped nails.






Video Transcription

Hi, I'm Kirsty Meakin from Naio Nails, In this video I'm going to talk to you about shapes about nail shapes. All the different ones well, there is like, so many it's unbelievable I'm gonna, I've selected four shapes to show you ok so Ballerina is really popular at the minute some people call it a coffin shape, I think that's really bad I wouldn't call the shape a coffin, it's a bit morbid but I prefer the ballerina, it's like a ballerina slipper so it's like a block so with this shape you have a straight side wall so it runs straight out of the natural nail and comes straight out, ok? you have a lovely soft apex and then it tapers down, so this comes down this is straight so you can see from my diagram exactly what I mean this is the side view so this is your lovely little finger here, this is your side view and you have an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny c-curve at the end it's very similar to a stiletto nail that's been lobbed off at the end so it's squared off I always say that they look like stilettos that have been lobbed off at the end they're great if you break a stiletto really good. If you break the end of your stiletto off, 'oh look at that, ballerina nail' so when you're looking at the over view, so the pan view of the nail drawn you a little diagram here so it's nice and flat here, so these come in and this is nice and flat it's going to taper from the widest point down to quite a thin point the longer this nail is, the more dramatic the shape's going to be so I'm going to show you now what it would look like on a shorter nail so if the nail was about here we probably take it to this shape so you still have a thin side wall coming in and then it's nice and flat at the front but it's not quite as thin as if it was longer the longer it is the thinner the end will be ok? It's just, that's how it works, it looks more pretty if it was even shorter it would come in here and then straight like that you know what looks really cool on this shape to do your smile line the same as the free edge by that I mean this, so I'll just colour this in and we colour all of this in I want you to sort of understand what I'm talking about, ok so imagine this is, I don't know, whatever colour you want it to be, purple or whatever, so imagine that free edge is that colour and then your smile line is the same shape as your free edge so you have this straight, straight and then straight at there so this would be a nice soft, you know, pink so you'll probably use natural beige or warm natural beige on this part here and then a nice colour there and it just exaggerates the shape and the style of this nail, which is super popular that's the ballerina nail I'm going to move on to my next nail and we have a competition square the competition square nail is slightly more exaggerated than a salon square nail so, you have, very straight side walls this point and this point are the same depth so all the way through here it will be the same depth same as that there, same as that there, same as that there until you get to the apex and then it's going to softly slope down and go flush into the cuticle. Nice and crisp and, no ledge or anything like that you've got a % c-curve which makes it super strong and super gorgeous and then you have a really deep smile line fair enough if you don't want a smile line, you want to do a full colour nail that's fine, but this is just a competition style square nail if you were doing it salon square, salon square would be a lot shorter maybe about there, and your smile line would be a little bit softer so it would appear like this the side walls are parallel when you look at the over view, so you're looking down on top of the nail parallel, running straight out of the side walls of the natural nail everything's very straight and very perfect when you do a competition style nail so that's your competition square and now we're going to do stiletto so a stiletto some people do stilettos really flat they look naff they still need to have a c-curve that runs underneath the nail really hard for me to draw that because I can't show you underneath the nail so underneath here will be a curve, this is not a flat nail flat nails will break, especially if they are stiletto you still have a nice apex, obviously I've exaggerated this a little bit for you so you can understand what I'm talking about it comes straight out of the side wall, it does not drop down it does not go up it's straight it comes sloping up to your apex and then it goes down to a very fine point when you have created this nail, or when you are creating this nail you will pinch this nail the form fit will be perfectly pinched the tip will be perfectly pinched and you will have that nice c-curve so, nicely pinched, not flat if it's flat, it will break and it'll look naff so a nice pinch to create a c-curve underneath the nail, so if you turned the nail over and looked at it you would see, oh thats a very nice curve under there, keeping it nice and strong and then the point will be very pointy some people in a salon, doing a salon stiletto nail would do, let me draw this for you a nail that comes in like this and instead of doing a really sharp point would just soften that point off just to make that a little bit more wearable for our ladies clients do actually have jobs and do things so they don't want to be stabbing people and piercing their own skin with the nails so we would just soften that off a little bit so, don't forget, with your stiletto, you still want a nice pinch to create a c-curve underneath the nail and don't forget straight out on the side walls, a nice soft apex that drops down that's the stiletto an edge nail I would say these were really popular last year and the year before I definitely think the ballerina has taken over the edge nail however, the edge nail is a beautiful nail it's quite difficult to do but it stretches your skills when you do it so have a go, because it really kicks you up the butt and makes you work hard so when we're talking about the edge nail, its going to come straight out of the side wall it's not going to drop, it's not going to go up or anything like that nice and straight clean lines and then you're going to have an apex so it's gently coming up in the back third of the nail and then its going straight the distance between here and here and here and here all the way to your apex will be the same so say, this will be one inch, one inch, one inch, obviously that would be a big nail it wouldn't be one inch, it would be more like, I don't know, mm or something but it needs to be the same all the way through an edge nail has a rooftop to it, so it has a point like this running down the nail so you can that in this little diagram here that I've done so it's flat here flat here, and that runs all the way down the nail and then softens off, so it goes soft, soft, soft and it's just round when you come to the apex, you're just going to soften that off and make it round also, when you're doing an edge nail it looks better if you do a chevron smile line so a nice pointy V and the V smile line, needs to be really, to make it look nice the same as the free edge so this shape here will be the same as this shape here so you've got straight parallel side walls when you look at the top view of it so when you look at the nail like this over the top you have got a straight parallel nail the spine of the edge nail runs in the middle of the nail so it's not going to be on one side or the other side or a bit skew-wif  or anything like that its going to run directly down the centre so you've got that spine that's really crisp running down the centre of the nail when you look at the nail down the barrel of the nail like this or like this to you it will look like this so that's what your c-curve will look like it will then become an upside down V so this is your spine and this will be the bottom of your side walls does that make sense? I hope so and that's the edge, I hope you understand that.


Thursday 19 May 2016

How to chose your perfect cover pink for acrylic nails?



Toffee Fudge
1) Always match the skin tone* of the client/person having the nails done:

    
Medium/Olive = Natural Beige or Warm Beige



Dark = Warm Beige or Toffee Fudge



Pale/Fair = Natural Beige or Baby Blossom
Baby Blossom
Baby Blossom












 
2) See if you have warm or cool undertones to your skin pigment, as this will effect how the colour acrylic you choose will look on your nails.

When you see yellow, orange, or olive undertones and veins that appear slightly greener than blue, you’re seeing indicators of warm undertones. Cool undertones will exude a bluish, purple, red, or pink sheen.


            Cool undertones = Pink colours

            Warm undertones =  Beige colours


*A trick is to look at the lightest part of their body. Where the veins meet along the inner wrist is the perfect place to reference. It’s also a great idea to compare skin tone to the person sitting next to you.


REMEMBER: What’s great about acrylic colours is that the rules are more forgiving than those for other beauty products. Nails are fairly removed from the face and they’re generally small canvases. Where certain colors when worn on the face, like eye shadow or lipstick, can make a person look sallow or tired, there’s a lot more freedom when it comes to nails!


~.~

Tuesday 17 May 2016

Our 3 different types of Acrylic Liquids





 Max Adhesion:

  • Setting speed* = 2 minutes
  • You don't need to use a Primer.


High Speed:

  • Setting speed* =  a little LESS than 2 minutes
  • Good for doing 3D nail art.

Medium Speed:

  • Setting speed* = a little MORE than 2 minutes
  • Recommended for beginners as it takes longer to dry i.e it will give you more time to apply and sculpt the acrylic.


None of them are odorless, but we have been told the maximum adhesion has a more pleasant odor.

  * Setting speed will depend on the temperature of the room used in. A warmer room will give a faster drying time.





Contact us: sales@naio.co.uk

www.naio-nails.co.uk
www.naio-nails.eu
www.naio-nails.us