Experiment with polish and perfume

Hi everyone!


I felt adventurous and I figured that would be a good mindset to try a new technique: spotted nails. I've been eyeing water marble manicures for quite some time, especially video's to figure out how to make a nice design. To make things a little easier on myself and to try this dunking-fingers-into-water stuff, I decided to go for a manicure that involves spraying the polish in the water with hairspray or perfume. Since I don't have any hairspray (the curly mess on top of my head just does what it wants, even if I would try to style it using cement or superglue!!) I opted for a perfume sample I had laying around and this is the result:

indoors, no flash

I used the absolutely glorious OPI DS Extravagance, a berry colored holo that is just pure perfection. On my index and pinky I needed just one coat, my thumb received a thin second coat because I thought I saw some bare spots and I finished with a coat of Seche Vite. My middle and ring finger were painted in two slightly thicker coats than usual of OPI Beyond The Pale Pink, a lovely cream color with pink undertones.

indoors, flash

After my ring and middle finger had dried completely, I covered both fingers up to half way my second phalange with liquid latex that I bought a while ago from a local store that sells theatre supplies and waited another five minutes to let that dry completely. I had already filled a plastic cup with tap water so all I had to do was put three drops of Extravagance in the cup, spray it with a couple of squirts from the sample (Jaïpur by Boucheron if you're interested) and dunk my fingers in the most interesting looking spot. After collecting the remaining polish with a toothpick I pulled my fingers out of the water, patted them dry with a tissue and removed the latex. That stuff is absolutely great! The only cleanup I had to do was near my cuticles but no polish was on my fingers (also the entertainment value of latex is unexpectedly high: my husband almost keeled over laughing when he saw what my fingers looked like before and after the dunking... but he's easily entertained ;) To finish off I applied a coat of Seche Vite on the spotted nails and that was it.

These are the two polishes I used:

OPI Beyond The Pale Pink, OPI DS Extravagance

I definitely want to experiment some more with this technique, maybe use hairspray or eau de toilette (as I think that contains more alcohol), use distilled water instead of tap water (like the water marble goddesses on YouTube do) etc. but for now I really like my nails as they are. Also, I'm so happy seeing Extravagance on my nails again. I absolutely love it and if direct light hits it, I can actually see the holo sparkle on my spotted nails (tried to capture that with flash, I'll let you be the judge if it worked ;)

Have you tried water marble? Or spotted nails? And did you tip over the cup of water and create a big mess like I did? Yup, totally did that... fortunately I was doing all this in the kitchen sink so the mess was easily cleaned up :D