Nail Art: A Pluto Perspective

All the excitement about Pluto recently inspired me to try something space-related on my nails. Galaxy designs are fun and I've done a couple of them, but I wanted to do something new this time. After some brainstorming (and perusing lots of NASA's new high-res pictures of Pluto), I decided: what about trying to recreate the surface of a planet on my nails?

Purple Turquoise Stone Nails

I've always been really intimidated by water marbling. I tried it once—sort of—several months ago, but it didn't go well at all and I've generally tried to avoid thinking too much about the technique since then. Because, honestly: a big mess AND nails that look crappy at the end? No thanks!

However, when I saw (and absolutely fell in love with) these turquoise stone nails by Lacquerstyle recently and discovered they were done with a simpler version of water marbling, I decided it was time to bite the bullet and brave using water in a manicure once again.

Teal & Turtle

I feel like I need to preface this post with a note about the colors in the photographs here: I'm really not happy with them! My camera seemed to hate this mani, no matter what I did to try to correct things. So, my apologies!

I ordered some Hex Nail Charms a while back but hadn't used them yet, so when I sat down recently to finally remedy that situation, I wanted to do something easy that also matched well with one of the charms. The turtle charm, in particular, was calling to me, so I decided to do a blue and teal saran wrap mani that reminded me of beautiful, clear waters where turtles might be found.

I started with a base of Zoya Zuza (love that name!) and let that dry, and then one nail at a time, I added a coat of Zoya Tart and dabbed the surface of each nail with a wadded up ball of saran wrap. Pretty easy! After adding some top coat and letting everything dry, I added the turtle charm with some nail glue. It stayed put perfectly until I was ready to remove it a few days later!

31DC2013 Day 6: Violet Nails

For day six of the 31 Day Challenge, I decided to try a new (well, new to me) technique: saran wrap nails.

My color in my pictures is a bit more saturated than I'd like (there was more contrast in real life), but this is a base of Essie Under Where? with piCture pOlish Shy Violet layered over the top and then dabbed with a ball of crumpled saran wrap to get the marbled effect. (There are tutorials all over the internet for this technique; Nailed It has a nice one. That is more or less the method I used, except I was lazy and just reused one larger ball of saran wrap for all my nails. It seemed to work fine!)

Next time I try this, I'll probably dab the top layer with the saran wrap more aggressively to get a more drastic marbled effect.