Spray Bottle Manicure

One of my favorite nail art blogs, The Nailasaurus recently linked to this awesome tutorial video for creating a manicure that looks like a turquoise stone. You drip polish on the surface of water (similar to a water marble manicure), and then spray the polish to create a fun texture. In the video she used spray hand sanitizer, but I had a similar tutorial pinned where they used rubbing alcohol (Check out that link for a quick photo step-by-step). And for my very favorite version, she got an amazing spotty texture by spraying nail polish remover, but I think the change in texture had more to do with the sprayer.

I've had some terrible luck with water marbling in the past, but after that recent video I couldn't get this technique off my mind. All the recent moving, unpacking, and cleaning kept me from painting my nails for a while, but I had to give this a try! I decided to use silver as a base color, black for the details, and sprayed with nail polish remover.

My first attempt was not the best. The only nail I liked was the pinky ~



I wiped off everything but that one nail  and gave it another go (topcoat over your basecolor helps it come off easy). This time I aimed my nails at the more intricate textures and they turned out great!



Wow! My favorite nail ended up being the middle finger on my right hand, so I had to include a picture of that. It was not easy to reach the button for this shot!



Sometimes I ended up getting a very faint gray marbling rather than black, so I just sprayed some more polish & dipped it again. You can see the traces of gray on the ring finger here.

By the way, I tried painting my fingers around the nail with glue like the video, but only had clear Elmer's glue on hand. It didn't peel off quite as nice as she showed, but I was able to rub it off. For the right hand I just taped around the nail ~ much quicker, but more clean up at the end!

I was shocked that these were so easy to do, and they turned out *awesome*. Many times I'll spend forever creating some intricate nail art, and by the time I'm done I just feel "meh" about it. It looks good, but I just don't care anymore! It's been a long time since I've done anything that wowed me like these.