Nail art tutorial : Dry marble nails

First attempt at dry marbling

I’ve always wanted marble nails, but water marbling just seems like such a messy process so I’ve been a bit hesitant to try it.  Then, a couple months ago, I saw this tutorial on dry marbling.  It sounds a lot less messier so I decided to give it a try.  I wasn’t able to take that many pictures of my first attempt since I wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out, so the following pictures were taken when I did my sister’s nails the next day.

To do this, you need the following:

Nail polish of your choice (2-3 colors will work best I think), a plastic bag (we used a ziplock bag) and some sort of stick to drag the colors together (you can use a toothpick or something, I just removed the cotton part of a q-tip)

So the first step would be to just pour some nail polish on to the plastic bag:

Spread it around a bit using the brush:

Don’t spread it too thin though.  Or else you’ll have trouble peeling it off later.

Continue doing this for the other colors:

Then the fun part:  Take your stick and drag it around to create a marble effect:

Your final pattern will depend on how to drag the nail polish around.  I would suggest not mixing them too much because it will end up looking murky.

If you’re not happy with how it turns out, you can always add more nail polish:

Scatter some drops around and mix again.

After this, just let the whole thing dry for a couple of hours.  Once it’s completely dry, you can start cutting it up and putting it on your nails.  For this you’ll just need scissors and some nail polish of any color:

(I probably should have used smaller scissors, but this worked too XD)

Very slowly peel the dried nail polish off the plastic:

Then cut up a tiny bit and fit it over your nail to see how it looks:

Cut it so that it fits your nail (this is the most boring part).

Then apply some polish to your nail:

After that, just put the piece that you’ve cut up earlier on top of the wet nail polish.  Clean it up a bit and that’s it 😀

Ta dah!  Marble nails 😀

It takes a while to do, so I would suggest doing this on days when you have some free time.  Or if you want, you can prepare the marble the night before, leave it to dry and cut it up the next day.

I should also mention that this will use up quite a bit of your nail polish, especially if you make a thick layer, but the results last a long time so I think it’s okay.  Mine lasted 3 weeks with very minimal chipping.  It probably would have lasted longer but I decided to re-do them anyway since my nails had grown so much so there was a huge gap between the nail polish and my cuticle.

Hope you found this helpful! 😀