peacock marble

If you've been keeping up with either my blog or Cuti-Clue-Les' (whom btw has totally redone her background recently and it looks awesooome) then you will know that I have just discovered a new love: water marbles.  Oh my god.  I think I could do water marbles forever and ever, and never get tired of them!

For color inspiration, because I always feel like I'll throw together something awful, I look to fashion magazines.  Yeah.  I read 'em.  So what?  Anyway, the writers/staff at these mags might not know exactly how I feel on every subject, especially my stance on being submissive to men, (sometimes Cosmo, I really do love ya, other times I feel like you're trying to subliminally message me into becoming an oral machine..) and the fashion stuff is always craaaaazy expensive and normally just impractical for my life.  I don't work on a runway!  But they're normally pretty good at puttin' colors together=]  I swear, since my nails became my obsession, magazines have just become these idea books for me, they're also really great for patterns and designs.

Anyway, so I got this month's Marie Claire, and found a page with a girl wearing this weird peacock dress.  It had all of the peacock-ish colors and a couple feather designs I think, but mostly the colors were just there all together, swirled and going in different directions..  I thought that would be cool to recreate!  Everyone is loving the peacock design right now, put your own spin on it if you're interested but kind of unsure!

Some of these are still blurry, sorry!  I promise I got my camera issues fixed, but these were taken the other day..
Anyway, I started with a base of Maybelline Color Show Porcelain party, then did my marble with Pure Ice French Kiss, Maybelline Color Show Tenacious Teal and Kleancolor Neon Yellow, as well as Finger Paints Art You Wondering, which didn't show up so much in pictures.

I really just love marbles now, they're so fun and easy!  Once you have your colors, you're good to go!  I use the tape method, so clean up is a breeze, and I get better with each one I do!  If you have been put off by a marble mani, or are unsure of whether or not to try one because of maybe things you might have read about them or whatever...don't be!  Practice is the only way to get better.  Basically what it comes down to is, if I can do it, then there's gotta be a way that you can do it too.  If you have any questions at all, let me know!

And I did not forget about yesterday's summer challenge that I missed, but I do however feel that I can make up for it tomorrow.  Have a fantastic day=]

My guest post for Cuti-Clue-Les!

Hey everyone, today I'm guest posting for Roisin at Cuti-Clue-Les!  If you haven't already, check out her blog!  Gogogogogo!

Hello lovely Cuti-Clue-Les readers!  I'm Amber from Never Naked Nails  and I'm here today to show you how my very first successful water marble went!  I love reading this blog and she was one of my first followers=] so when she tweeted that she wanted guest posts, I thought, "Hey, I could do that.."

I have been putting off doing this for a while, simply because I was afraid I would mess it up.  I had tried a water marble mani once before, and it just made my nail a mess.. so that kind of discouraged me from it.  If you take a look at my blog though, you'll notice that I'm not shy to post my manis, and often am really critical of them, but I constructively criticize myself, and I'm always confident that with a little practice anything can be accomplished =]

If you want to know why I tried again, it's because I researched the CRAP out of it first.  I googled, I trolled blogs, watched a couple videos..finally, I knew I was ready.

I didn't even have to question what polishes to use.  In my mind, my Zoyas from the spring collection would be just perfection together!

 I wanted to do a couple of things with this experiment, and one of them was to see how time consuming it would actually be.  I've read it can take up to two hours of your time!  In all honesty, it would've taken quite a bit longer if I had done all the nails on both hands, but I left out my pinkies and indexes.  My indexes really helped me out taping and doing my right hand while my left was still drying.  That was nerve-wracking enough, and actually sucked because I ended up having to redo my indexes.  Yes, you read that right.  I'm the girl who messes up the non-marbled nails.  After all of that it took me about an hour, but would've been less if I weren't too impatient to wait for my index fingers to dry.  Anyway, here is my desk, with all of my supplies after I got done:

 Base coat: LA Colors, Zoya Tru, Cho and Bevin, top coat: Seche Vite

For my water, I had a half a bottle of water that I hadn't finished from work all night, and decided it would be perfect.  From what I gather, you need to use filtered/bottled water free of the minerals and whatnot that comes with tap water.  It also needs to be room temperature.  I also have an orange wood stick, that's what I used to trace around my cuticles before I took my finger out of the water.  I taped off all around my nails using three pieces of tape per finger.  I found out that if you prefer to do the taping method (some people like to use cuticle oil, which I have none of & that sounds messier)  then after you have all your tape on, fold it around the rest of your finger, so it doesn't get in the way and touch your other wet nails.  Just be sure to leave a tab so removal is super easy!

I used my LA Colors base coat, then one layer of Zoya Cho on all my fingers.  I think my not waiting for the base coat to dry caused Cho to pool to one side on some nails..I could've just been moving so fast (I was excited to get to the next part!) that I gave her vertigo...

After I did my dipping and tracing, I waited about a minute before removing my tape.  Just a tip: be wary of polishy water droplets! they will splatter if you are not careful when removing the tape.  Not cool, water!  I waited so long to put on Seche Vite.  I was afraid to touch it, even with that stuff.  I don't really know how long it takes to dry, but I felt safe with about ten minutes.  While I waited, I did another coat of Cho on my pinkies and indexes, and then taped up my right hand (so should've done that in the beginning lol) and then continued everything on my right hand thumb, middle, and ring fingers.

My absolute favorite thing from this mani has to be my left ring finger.  I was surprised with how cool it turned out!  Tru blends right on in with Cho and Bevin as my tip so perfectly, it looks like I did it on purpose.  I tried to make a blurry photo, so that you could tell that Tru kept her shimmer through the marble process =]

My right is a bit more awkward, you can tell the purple in Tru is more washed out, and I think that has to do with not tracing around my finger fast enough, but I was just trying to be careful!  I need more practice, but I think I have promise =]

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and thanks to Cuti-Clue-Les for having me =]