Beauty Of Dahlias: Water Marbling

Hey everyone,

I guess you all have heard of this technique at one point or another. In case you haven’t, a short explanation. When you use this technique you have a cup of water in which you can drop different colours of nail polish which you can swirl. You then dip your finger in it and you have the swirls on your nail :)

I think the most useful way is when you do it in form of a bulls eye, from there you can swirl the colours in any way you want, you can make even forms or just swirl them around the way you like it. At the end I will show you pictures how to do it…. Or more how I do it ;)

I found out about Water Marbling on Youtube. I have never been someone who watched a lot of Youtube, but one day I dropped my Laptop…I'm kind of clumsy sometimes :D and it took some time until it was repaired, so I started to search for movies or TV series on Youtube. I didn’t find much that interested me in that regard but when I opened the app there was always the popular or favorites and there it showed a video about water marbling. I watched it and started to search for more videos and then I saw on the sidebar more videos about make-up, nail polish and so on. Since then I am addicted to YouTube tutorials :)

Of course I had to try this ‘water marbling’ right away. In the videos it looks sooooo easy but when you try it just doesn’t want to work… that was my first experience with water marbling. Since I have watched a lot of videos about this I thought I knew pretty much everything I needed to make it work and look good. I had a cup of room temperatured water, a bit paper towel, pretty new nail polish and some toothpicks. So I started, I dropped in my nail polish and waited that it would spread and get thinner. And I waited and I waited and it finally had spread a teeny tiny bit! And I thought “what the heck did I do wrong?” So I tried it again….and again…and…again. But it didn’t matter it just didn’t work. The colours stayed pretty much a drop and when you tried to put in your nail and pull it back out you just had all the colours you used mixed together on your nail and big fat drops of polish dripped of your nail. I was so disappointed because it looked so easy and I felt a bit stupid because I just couldn’t get it done. But over the next few weeks I tried it again and again but it still didn’t work. At some point I bought these plastic nails you can glue to your real once. I don’t like them, in their real purpose but to try new nail designs or for trying water marbling they are perfect. Just glue them to the ends of skewers, I hope that’s the right word :)

By now I think I found out that the nail polishes I used are not the best for water marbling. I used nail polish from Essence, Manhattan, L.A. colors, Kiko, Astor, Maybelline, Lacura Beauty and Sally Hansen. I noticed in all my trys that Sally Hansen nail polish was spreading a lot better than all the others so I tried to do water marbling just with Sally Hansen nail polish and wonder oh wonder it worked :D YEAH!!

So as a conclusion I would say that not every nail polish is usable for water marbling. I want to try some other brands for nail polish, like OPI (I really want to try that nail polish!! ), China Glaze and so on, but they are kind of hard to get here in Germany, maybe I’ll have to buy them from Amazon.

Do you guys know some good place to buy nail polish where it’s not overly expensive? I found some OPI nail polish in a perfumery but for one polish they wanted nearly 17€ and as much as I love nail polish I’m not ready to pay that much money for just one polish.

But now let’s get to how to do water marbling !!!