Cherry Blossom Nails

So about a month ago Barry M released some new nail art pens in black, silver, white and pink. I’ve seen good comments about them online so decided to give them a try. I had a little play with them straight away on top of the nails I was already wearing that week and was very pleased with the results. I decided for my first proper nail design using them I would go for a cherry blossom design.

I used the black pen for the branches and randomly drew those on top of the colour I chose for my background. Luckily for this design it didn’t matter how messy the right hand ended up looking lol. Then I used a medium sized dotting tool to place white dots on top of the branches. When this was dry I added smaller pink dots on top of the white ones before adding a top coat. I recommend using a top coat with the pens to stop it wearing off too easily.

I’ve always struggled with doing very fine lines neatly in my nail art as I find normal nail varnish to thick and quick drying, even when using thin nail art brushes. I am trying to avoid buying a load of acrylic paint colours to use, which I have seen many others do to get such detail, as I already have too many nail varnishes to fit in the room I have as it is lol.

As well as thin brushes, I have also tried in the past those bottles that have a metal tip with a hole in like a needle where you squeeze the nail varnish through in order to do details. However I always end up with big blobs or I poke a smudge into the still soft base layer of my design. Also I find no matter how long I leave it to dry my top coat will smear the whole thing when I attempt to apply it.

However with the Barry M pens the nib is more like a real pen and it did not drag dents in my base colour. It reminds me a bit of those handwriting pens they used to give you in primary school. Except with the nail pens you can press the nib in to get more of the colour to come into the nib if required. I also found that the consistency is thinner than normal nail varnish which also helps with doing thin lines. However I did find that sometimes you needed to go over a line again to make the colour bold enough. Despite this I found the pens dry very quickly and that my top coat did not ruin the design at all when applying it. All in all I was very impressed with these and they were as easy to use as a normal pen.