Mani Monday: Marble Nails

Last week I had a couple of days off and decided to venture to the beauty supply store to pick up new nail polish colors for summer. I chose bright bold colors and was thinking... wouldn't it be great if I could incorporate these all together? I remembered a tutorial I saw on YouTube on how to do marble nails and decided to give it a shot. I have to say it was a a trial and error kind of experience. I'm much more confident in the technique now than when I did my first hand. As they say, practice makes perfect. All you'll need is a couple of your favorite nail polish colors, a bowl of room temperature water, scotch tape, nail polish remover and q-tips. 

Fill a bowl with room temperature water. 

You'll need a white nail polish as a base and then others for the marble technique. 

I chose Sally Hansen White On, Essie Strawberry Sorbet, Zoya Pippa, Essie One of a Kind, Essie Mint Candy Apple & Essie Big Spender

Start off with clean nails. I also used a base coat: OPI Natural Nail Base Coat

Next paint your nails with one coat of white nail polish. When you do the marbling, this coat will come in handy.

Use scotch tape around your nails, on all four sides. This will make for an easy clean up. 

Drip nail polish into the room temperature water. 

After several drops it will begin to look like this. You'll need to do this fairly quickly because the nail polish starts to harden. You can also use a toothpick to make designs in the nail polish. Dip your finger in and collect any excess nail polish left in the bowl. Continue this process for each finger, adding drops, creating patterns if you wish, and then dipping your nail. 

After each of your nails has been dipped, wait a couple minutes for it to dry. Because the nail polish has been dropped into water, it's not a liquid consistency anymore so it won't take long to dry.

Remove the tape, clean up around your nails with some nail polish remover and q-tips and voilà! 

Braid Bar

I've heard of DryBar in California and NYC where you can get a perfect blowout for $35 and it's the only service they offer, but I was wondering the other day if they had a braid bar. I love braids but the only one I've been able to master is the fishtail braid.. thanks to a tutorial I posted here when I first started my blog. So I did a little research the other night to see if there was such a thing, and there is! Bergdorf's in NYC opened the John Barrett Braid Bar in the beginning of last summer. It's $45 for any and every kind of braid you could ever dream of, from fishtail braids to french braided up do's to milkmaid braids, they do it all. It had me thinking if I would actually shell out the cash to get my hair braided... I'm going to go with yes! That is, if I had somewhere good to go. I feel like it's one of those things you have to try once. Would you pay someone to braid your hair?

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