Water Spotted Mani

Just while ago in a Facebook nail art group I stumbled upon a video by cutepolish about wated spotted nails (you can see the video here) and of course I immediately thought that I needed to try it myself. I never got my hands on OPI Black Spotted (for a reasonable prize) and after trying it out recently, I'm not even sure if I'd like to own it. Well, maybe if I got it for free... But I'm sure I'm not paying any of those ridicilous prizes that you see it being sold on ebay and such, so a cheap alternative for a similar look works really well for me.

First I tried to do this with hand sanitizer (like used in the video), but mine wasn't really working as it just made one big hole to the polish. Also it seems that I don't own any black (or dark grey) polishes that would work nicely with water marbling in general, so I had to choose some other color to do this with. So, then I read from the same nail art group in Facebook, that some had succesfully tried it with hair spray and then also Sonne posted her nails that were done with hair spray, so with that and a polish that work nicely with water marbling I finally managed to do this.

So basically I did this the same way that was shown in the video, but I just replaced the hand sanitizer with a regular hair spray. Still, you really have to be careful with the distance where you spray and also the amount that you spray, and it took me couple of tries to get them all right. But after you master all those things this is really quite easy to do and I think it gives a really fun look to a manicure. I know it doesn't look the same that you get with the Black Spotted polish, but it's definately in the same alley and with this you can use any colors you like.

I used my existing mani (which was this mani with Essie Mint Candy Apple and OPI GoldenEye) as the base and then I did the wated spotted look with Barielle A Bouquet For Ava.

If you haven't seen the tutorial video, here's shortly what you need to do to achieve this look:

- First paint your nails with the desired base color (and base coat) regularly and wait it to dry.

- Then you drop polish to water like in water marbling. I used only two or three drops of polish to each nail. Also you should cover your cuticles with some tape like when doing water marbling, this will help the clean up afterwards.

- When you have the circle of polish in the water, you spray the hair spray (or hand sanitizer) to it and then the spots will appear.

- Then you just dip you nail to the polish to the section that looks best like when you're doing water marbling

- After that you should have the water spotted mani, just do the clean up and apply top coat.