Stargazer White Nail Art Pen > Reviews (2)

I have a friend who does amazing nail art, she does amazing tiny pictures of flowers and butterflies amongst other things on peoples nails using normal nail varnish. I decided that I wanted to try and create some funky patterned nails for myself but found creating detail with a normal nail varnish brush was almost impossible. I came across the stargazer nail art pens on Ebay, you can buy sets containing several different colours but I chose to buy a single pen first to see if I liked it choosing the white one.

Stargazer are a company which specializes in making funky make up, I love their nail varnishes in general because not only are they cheap they are really good quality and come in cool metallic colours as well as the normal boring colours. I buy stargazer products from a shop in Sterling Mills designer outlet for a pound or two each but you can also buy them from the stargazer website for £3.

The nail art pen differs from normal nail varnish because it is in a squeezy plastic bottle and has two ways to apply the varnish. When you twist the top off you get a brush like normal varnishes but if you pull the top part of the lid off there is a pen which allows you to make dots or draw fine lines. The pen is actually a very thin metal tube which allows the varnish to be squeezed out, the nib is very fine probably less than a mm across and the tube gets blocked with dried out varnish easily so you need to have a pin on hand to unblock this nozzle when this happens.

I find the varnish inside the nail art pen stinks, the normal star gazer nail varnish does not have such a high odour and I wonder if this is because this varnish has more solvent in it to allow it to be slightly thinner than normal. Because the nail varnish is for stripes and dots the brush is extremely thin and almost impossible to use to paint a whole nail. It does however make it fairly easy to draw a fairly thick line with it, I have found it difficult to draw anything but straight lines using the brush as when I try any kid of curves then it always ends up smudging and looking messy. The pen nib adds tiny dots or draws nicely in straight and curved lines but you need to have a steady hand.

The white colour is almost cream rather than bright white and once it is on the nails it stays put for a very long time with no chipping and flaking away. Because you put a thin coat on the design does not protrude from the surface of the nail making it easy to catch on things. The colour is not very evident on naked nails but once you have applied a deep base coat it stands out nicely and the bottom coat does not show through even if you use black as a base. The colour has a nice pearly shiny finish which shimmers under the light and is really attractive.

The stargazer nail art pen is not perfect, the fact it smells so bad and you can’t use the brush easily to cover a full nail are downsides meaning that I am going to try out different brands to see if they fare any better rather than buy more stargazer pens in other colours.