How to Get French Nails Like a Parisian Nail Polish Artist

Nail polish has come a long way from what it was before, and it definitely wasn’t always so fabulous. While we were slightly older back then, it would be tough to call a balayage not sexy. Today, the biggest celebrities in Hollywood enjoy giving their nails a sexy, soft touch with less attention paid to the colors, and we absolutely love it.

French manicure may have been the first thing we heard about when we were older, but one of the first things we saw our friend Regina teach us — especially as a kid in Paris — is that French manicures are nice. She taught us to use a less-is-more mentality with our fingers and to use multiple layers to achieve even more beautiful nips and tucks with prettier wing tips. Since then, we’ve seen more and more celebs pop with subtle touches of the trend, like Cheryl Fernandez-Versini’s subtle French finger trim and Khloé Kardashian’s glamorous half-moon nails.

OK, so not a chunky French manicure (or even quite that) — but a modern version of it that really moves the needle for beauty. Fasten your seatbelts, because we are about to take you to the spelunking station — because that’s how amazing Regina is. Regina shows us how to really explore the new world of nail color — namely she’s into petroleum base coats. What’s that again? She tells us she’s into “oil polish!” Oh, and she also thinks butter on the inside is the way to go.

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Why, you may ask? “In the end, when it comes to the nail file, it’s just never in the same place twice, and you want to have the freedom to try a lot of different colors and everything in between because nails change. And when they do, you want to have a base coat to adjust to that.” How can you adjust to a new color if your nail only falls one shade in the new color’s tone? By using a base coat to start out at “half the depth,” as Regina calls it. How long will that base coat stay on top? A long time, since it’s made for that purpose.

And what about the color? “It’s very user-friendly to adjust the light. The bottom half of the base coat is a good hydrating base coat that keeps your nails in a beautiful shape. You can go back and later and make the top coat more light and [try] just some gold [or] titanium, or even titanium dioxide.”

So basically, the more options you have, the better — and that’s totally fine. Can you get away with three base coats a day for a year? There’s your answer. So how would you know what colors to use? Well, “a big piece of advice is to do colors that you would normally use on the top of your ears in the U.S., because that would be the black part of your ears,” Regina says. “So we will go for a lot of neutrals with golds or bright pigments.”

See what we mean? In Paris, we were pretty comfortable rocking gold-plated nails and — in general — tinted colors, and this entire theme just flourishes over there. Finally, here is the nude to go with all the other nude colors!

Keep reading to see Regina’s most personal tips for achieving these nail ensembles, which would make any momager blush.