Water Marble

I have wanted to try a water marble manicure for a while now; all the videos and pictures online made them look so fun and cool. Last night while my husband was at the Vikings game a friend came over and we set to drinking beer and water marbling our nails. This is not the type of manicure you can do on a whim; there are so many tools and products necessary I felt like we were putting together a science experiment.

What you will need:
paper towels
toothpicks
Q-Tips
nail polish remover
disposable plastic cups
room temp water
name brand tape
3 or more polish colors (I used Sally Hansen CSM Frutti Petutie and Parrot and Savvy Totally Teal, Gayle used Orly Liquid Vinyl and OPI Alpine Snow and Strawberry Margarita)
6 or more beers

Here is the gist on the process, first you lay down some paper towels cause it is going to get messy. Open your first beer. Unscrew all your polish lids so you can work quick like a ninja. Put the water in the cup and get a few toothpicks at the ready. At this point you have the joy to start taping a finger or two, I would suggest to tape and paint your thumbs last as they are the most helpful fingers. Using name brand tape is not optional, for my first three fingers I used Hy-Vee brand tape and as you will be able to see in the pictures below, it left all the adhesive on my finger when I pulled the tape off, once I switched to good old Scotch this problem ended. Open beer number two, you deserve it after the taping work. After your finger is taped you can start putting paint in the water, simply put one drop of a color in the middle of the cup and repeat the process with the other colors, use a toothpick to swirl the colors around to make cool designs. Dip your finger in the part of the design you want, be sure to pull the tape off while the paint is still wet and then fish out the left over paint from your cup before doing the next nail. Some of the nails turned out awesome and some look like vomit but after all the work it was definitely time to open another beer.

As you can see, the paper towel was very necessary

Gayle hated her nails so much she repainted them that night, I thought these two were pretty cool.

 

Before clean up (clean up took until the next day to complete) notice all the lovely adhesive on my fingers. It was awesome when my sheets stuck to them that night.

 

Cleaned up left hand

 

Cleaned up right hand, please ignore the Band-Aid, I may have cut my finger shaving, I’ll let you think about that for a while.

I would totally try this manicure again, it was kind of a pain in the ass (my sister in law would describe it as putsy) but overall it was fun and even the ugly ones look kind of cool.