Let's Try Water Marbling!

Hello everyone! Many of you may have seen a cool looking design that is done on your nails that is created with water, this is called water marbling. You may wonder how this is done, or like me, you want to try this but it looks difficult or just way to messy. 

After a long time of wanting to try water marbling and having someone ask how is that done, I finally decided to give it a try. I will warn you, I did run into some problems myself, but I was able to create some kind of marble effect, so I can still do a tutorial.  

 First attempt at Water marbling, turned out okay for my first try?

Here are the nail polishes and tools needed for this water marble design:

Base Coat and top coat - Nicole OPI-  3in1- base, top, & strengthener and Revlon Extra Life No Chip top coat.

Nail polishes used- Revlon Gel envy- Sure thing, Sally Hansen- Hard as Nails - No hard feelings, and Milani- Quick Teal.

Tools used- Let two cups of water set over night or for a few hours to be room temp, tape, and toothpicks.

For clean up- a Q-tip with a precision tip, and acetone nail polish remover.

As for rating, as stated above I feel that I can't give a fair rating due to the fact that I ran into some issues myself. Water marbling I found requires a lot of trial and error! 


Let's give this water marbling a try! 

1. Like with any nail design or just painting your nails, apply a base coat. 

2. Paint all of your nails white. This helps the colors stick to your nails and to be opaque. 

3. Things are going to get messy! To help things be a little less messy, take two small pieces of tape, put that on both sides of the nail, then put a large piece around the nail. Their is also a thing called liquid latex (which I don't have) that can be painted around the fingers, then simply peeled off for easy clean up.

If you want to know more about liquid latex Elleandish (Janelle) has a good review on YouTube about it. 

4. Take your cup of clean room temp. water, or water that is not too hot or too cold. Some people have said to use filtered water and some say tap water is fine. I used room temp. tap water. I also strongly suggest having two cups of water, one for your right hand and another for your left. I only had one and when I went to do my left hand the water was too murky and was impossible to work with. 

*Make sure to have your polishes, toothpicks, and everything close by. You need to move quickly for this and it is best to have everything close.  

5. Uncap both of your nail polishes and leave them uncapped for this step, this helps to create the bulls-eye quickly. Take the first polish that you want to use and make sure the brush has a lot of polish on it that way it will drip into the water. With a fully loaded brush, place it close to the water and let the polish dip into the water, then wait for it to spread. Do this for the next color as well. Repeat this step as many times as you would like, to create a bulls-eye.

I used two colors a purple and teal cream polish, you can use more if you would like. Also not all nail polishes will work for water marbling, you really just have to test them out. I found that cream polish that will drip well worked the best. 

6. Once you have the bulls-eye that you want. Take a toothpick dragging from the center outward works best to make a design. For a beginner like us, you don't have to make a intricate design, you can just drag your tooth pick and make a simple design that doesn't need to be perfect. 

7. Now find a part of the design that you like then dip your finger in. You are actually suppose to dip your finger in at an angle, which I did not do. As you can see I dipped it straight in. Then take your toothpick and remove the excess polish around your finger.

8. Then remove your finger. As you can see even though I didn't do it right is still tuned out.

For each finger repeat steps 5- 8. You can dip them one at a time or dip up to three fingers at a time.

 Here is the final results of the water marble done on my left hand.

As always once your design has dried apply a top coat. As you can see my first attempt turned out okay on my right hand. A few fingers I had to re-dip because it didn't tun out or was not opaque enough.

 The sadness that is my right hand.

For my right hand this was a whole another story, as I ran into so many problems! As you can see, only three fingers somewhat turned out. I don't know what happened with the middle finger, then the ring and pinky finger and at that point with all of my frustration, I just painted a solid color.

Here are some of the problems I ran into (mainly with my right hand.)

- The first cup of water got to murky and would not work at all.

 - I didn't have an extra cup of room temp water, then I had to wait for another cup to hopefully get at room temp. This still was not working well.

 - Sometimes the polish just would not spread.

In conclusion, the actual water marbling steps are simple, the part that is difficult is the process, getting the right polish to spread, the right room temp water, and for the design to come out. With a lot of practice, trial and error water marbling can be done. Also even though I had issues with water marbling I will give this another try!

Hope this tutorial about water marbling was somewhat helpful, even though I ran into some issues myself. Like anything it is a learning process and we can all learn together.

Here is a video from Sara Beauty Corner, she gives a great video for beginners on how to water marble, just in case you need some extra help!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A5onIW9j3Y 

 

See you next time for my next nail tutorial!