Passionately Pintrest: Newspaper Text on Nails!

What is Passionately Pintrest? The perfect excuse to indulge my Pintrest obsession of course! Every week or so I'll take one of my pins and actually make it happen. Recipes, beauty treatments, projects. Are they as tasty as they look? As easy as people make them seem? 

This weeks Pin: Text on nails...

Directions attached to pin:

1. Put on nail polish and let dry. 

2. Dip fingernail in alcohol-basically any will do, vodka is suggested. 

3. Press a strip of newspaper big enough to cover the whole nail on to your alcohol soaked nail. 

4. Pull off slowly and be really impressed with yourself. 

5. Paint top coat if desired.

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Sounds really easy right? Yeah, well. This one was an absofreaking bitch to actually get to work and thoroughly kicked my ass. 

Took 3 days of attempts, 4 different bottles of nail polish, 2 newspapers, lots of nail polish remover and a hell of a lot of swearing before I figured it all out.


So what it actually takes...

1. Paint nails and let dry completely. Use a light color. I went with a pale gray (white didn't get great results). Do not use a metallic nail polish. For some reason text just will not stick to them.

Work nails one at a time for the rest of the steps

2. Dip nail in alcohol. Vodka didn't really work for me. Rubbing alcohol worked better. Finally used Carolina Moonshine and it worked great! Soak for 15-30 seconds.

3. Quickly place newspaper over alcohol soaked nail and press to the shape of nail. The wetter the paper the better the transfer. After paper was in place I added a little extra liquid by dipping a finger in alcohol and pressing into paper. Hold for around 30 seconds with firm pressure. Make sure you put pressure across the whole nail or you'll only get a partial transfer. To check if it's going right you can lift one side carefully to see if you need more liquid/pressure before removing strip completely. 

4. I peeled the paper off instead of sliding it. That worked much better. Otherwise it smeared a bit.

5. A clear coating is a must! After the transfer the paint is very dull looking. Once nail has dried from the alcohol add clear polish. Do this quickly and with a liberal amount of nail polish. If you add the layer too thinly so the brush is in a lot of contact with the nail you will smear the text like on my middle nail.


You'll probably get a bit of text on your skin but it wipes off easily. If you goof on a nail just get it a little wet and the text will wipe off of there as well. I'd just use the pad of another finger to do this and it worked fine. 

End result: Not quite as pretty but doable with some effort. 

This was a lot harder than I expected until I got the steps above figured out. After a couple nails it went quickly.  The top picture was the one I started with and took about 3 days before I got to this point I ended up redoing a couple but wanted to show the smearing. The bottom picture only took about 15 minutes start to finish. So not bad at all once I got the hang of it. 

So, maybe not for every day wear but kinda fun now and again, right? Maybe for a book conference?!

Have a suggestion for the next Passionately Pintrest? Let me know. My pintrest account is linked over on the left but you can send me one of your own too! If any of yall have tried doing one of your pins let me know so I can come check it out!