How To Do An Acrylic French Manicure

Hello my name is Laura Bliss. I've been a nail technician for the past 12 years now. I'm currently teaching at the London College of Beauty Therapy.

So I'm now going to show you how to do sculptured acrylic with pink and white. So first of all I've just buffed the nail already to take away the shine. You need to wipe over the nail with steritaine or an anti-bacterial spray just to make sure there's no bacteria on the nail.

Okay we're going to put on the sculpting foam, and then just lightly squeeze the end. We're gong to put on primer. This is in the form of a pen but they do come in bottles as well.

So just lightly go over the nail, the whole natural nail. This just dehydrates the nail so it's ready. This is a size 8 brush.

The smaller the brush, the easier it is to work with. So if you're new to it, I'd probably go for about a 6. We're going to firstly start with a white tip.

Okay, so dip your brush into the acrylic liquid and then sweep it along in the white powder to pick up a bead about this size. Place it on to the sculpting foam, wipe your brush, and then pat it across the free edge. You need to work with it quite quickly because it will dry.

So we've done the white tip so we're now going to swap the white with the pink. So your first bead goes at the stress point. So that's the point where the tip is most likely to break.

So again pick up a nice little bead on your brush. Place it in the stress point, which is just above the white. Pat it across with your brush and then drag it down over the white.

The second bead. Again pat it down first of all. Once it's over to the side, to the nail wall, you just drag it over your white.

And then your final bead just goes in the cuticle area. Just put it just below the cuticle area because you still want a nice margin around the cuticle, and then just stroke it down the acrylic. Just making sure that it's nice and flat around that cuticle area.

So to make sure that it's dry, just tap it with the end of your brush and you will hear like a dull sound. Take off your foam, and then we're going to file it into shape. We're going to take down the lip and file it into shape.

Okay so you want to maintain a nice C-curve now so it's kind of in like a half moon shape. So go from the sidewall into the center. Just make sure that you're pulling the client's skin back so you don't catch it with your file.

So the next thing we need to do is just go over with a white block. This takes out the scratches from the extension file. At this point you can see if there's any areas that you need to improve on, and you can just go back with your extension file and make sure it's perfect.

I'm going to use a three way buffer. Start with the harder side first. This is the medium grip.

And then just before you put your final buffer, just put some cuticle oil on, this rehydrates the cuticle and just helps to make it really shiny. And then finish off with a really good buff to make them super shiny. Okay? And that is your acrylic sculpture.