Fish Tail Tutorial

Yes, I think I am having a small obsession with "fish" or something! Well don't worry because I don't know what else you can do that has an involvement with fish on my nails. As you guessed, we will be learning how to create a fish tail manicure that was based off of the new popular braid. This technique is also referred to as braid, weave, or basket nails!

My accent nails have the fish tail technique!

And here is my hair in a fish tail braid. :)

Aren't they really pretty? This may be another

tutorial for another day on another blog. ;)

And before we get started, I should tell  you the truth and give you a heads up -- This is the first time that I tried out this manicure and I started off with practicing on my thumb and in the meanwhile taking pictures of each step to use for my picture tutorial. In the end, I thought that the nail turned out very pretty. And that is where I went wrong. I tried doing fish tail nails on all of my nails and here is what happened: I failed EPICALLY. I realized that since these are geometric-sort-of nails, they need to be pretty similar in order to look clean and that didn't happen My suggestion is when you're first trying this technique out, try on a thumb and/or ring finger for accent nails. Those look really nice and in that case, you don't have to worry about making all the nails perfectly matching (in size of stripe, angle, etc.). Okay enough with the blabbering, let's start this tutorial. (That is the ONE thing I am very proud of. It took me an hour to photoshop, but I was so happy to finish and see the turn out! Sorry for the excessive watermarks! That is how protective I am of this baby . ;))

You only need:

• 3 different nail polish colors

I used (from left to right) Hard to Get, Gaga for Green, and Smoke and Ashes.



Now let us begin our free hand fish tail nail tutorial! It is difficult to explain verbally but hopefully the pictures help. And you may noticed that there is a pattern going on! I will also refer to my colors with these labels: white = A, green = B, and black = C.

1. Start off with your base color, A. This will be 1 of your 3 stripe colors.
2. Draw a diagonal stripe from the left bottom corner to the opposite side with your B color.
3. Draw another diagonal stripe from the right bottom corner to the opposite side with your C color.
4. With color A, draw a diagonal stripe that is basically right on top of your B color and in the same direction.
5. With color B, draw another diagonal stripe on top of your C color and in the same direction.
6. Repeat with color C and just draw another line on top A and in the same direction.
7. Repeat with A on top of B.
8. Repeat with B on top of C.
9. And to finish, just draw a line with C in a diagonal line to meet in the middle of your B color and that is how you finish!
 ~ This is just how many times that I had to do the stripes. Every one's nails will vary! The basic pattern is to just keep on drawing diagonal lines on top of the 2nd to last line that you just made.

I did take step-by-step pictures of my other four nails in the process of making them all fish tailed, but they turned out horrible in the end, so I will only post the finished one.

Yes, this is something that I have to practice... Don't worry! I will!

It was fun learning :)



I did take this manicure off because it was not my best work. I did like how my ring and thumb finger turned out so that was the only win situation when I replaced the other fingers with green :) I hope that the tutorial did help and I'd LOVE to see your work if you tried this out! You can tag me @PolishPals on Instagram or email me photos at yaypolishparty@gmail.com Until next time, Your Polish Pal, Jenna