Polish Groupie

Water Marbling: Lessons Learned

For your viewing pleasure, this is my first attempt at water marbling intended to be worn in public. What I mean by that is the first time I stumbled across the concept of water marbling and watched a video tutorial on how to do it, I had to give it a try immediately. It was just with the first bunch of polishes I could grab, and I had absolutely no intention of leaving it on, i just had to try it on one nail. That was many, many months ago. It actually came out well in terms of execution but the colors weren’t right since I hadn’t actually tried to pick ones that went well together.

So now what you see here was an attempt that actually was intended for public consumption. Let me say upfront that I know the photo isn’t that great, and neither is the condition of the manicure. I don’t have any excuse for the photo other than that the lighting was bad when I took it and it’s just what I had to deal with. But as far as the manicure, I had already been wearing it for a week when I took this, so please forgive the chips, nail growth, etc.

Overall I’d give myself a C+/B- on this in terms of how happy I was with it. I learned a few valuable lessons, which I’ll share in a second.

Before I get to that, here are the colors I used. The base color on all of my nails is two coats of Zoya Jolene (hot pink). For the water marbles on my two ring fingers, I used Zoya Jolene, Zoya Robyn (neon blue), Zoya Jancyn (neon orange), Orly Rage (shimmery bronze) and Revlon Calla Lilly (sparkly white). I used Maybelline Express Finish Base & Top Coat as the basecoat, and one coat of Poshe as the top coat.

First: Don’t be an idiot that uses a polish she’s never tried on before AT ALL in a water marble. I bought the Revlon Calla Lilly specifically because I wanted a white to use in water marbling (and because I had a coupon for it at Target). But what I realized too late is that it’s actually very sheer, so it just wasn’t a good choice to use in this type of nail art. If you look on my right finger you can see a faint hint of glitter just about where the glare spot is. That’s the Calla Lilly. On my left finger, you’ll see a huge wide open space in the middle of the nail that butts up against a nice swirl of Orly Rage: that’s the Revlon Calla Lilly. So using a visible color here would have made a huge difference. Duh. This is the part where I confess that I actually hadn’t tried on any of them before; I had recently purchased all of these colors (the Zoyas in particular with water marbling in mind) and hadn’t used any of them yet. Double duh. That said, the others were great.

Second: I think I used too much of the Jolene, i.e. the base color, in the water marble design. I wanted it to be tied in to the rest of the manicure, but I think I ended up with spots where it just looked blank because it was the same color as the base.

Third: Orly Rage looks absolutely amazing in a water marble. I loved, loved, loved the way it looked. It really drew my eye to it. I would actually catch myself staring at it sometimes. Will definitely use it in another one.

So that’s the long and short of it. Perhaps next time I will graduate to a full set of water marbles, though I have to admit that the thought is rather daunting. It’s a very cool process that is very difficult to control. But if it comes out right, so, so cool!