Pin marble

This months theme for Cyw’s “Mottomonat” is “Farb-Spiel”, which gave me a great opportunity to finally try pin marbling:

To my surprise, this was probably the easiest and quickest nail art I have ever done. 🙂

I started with one coat of “Mint Candy Apple” and let it dry. Then, one finger after another, painted another two coats – without waiting for them to dry in between – of “Mint Candy Apple”, a stripe each of “free hugs” and “L.O.L” in the still wet base color and used a toothpick to “draw” small spirals on the edges of the stripes.

You pretty much can’t do anything wrong, as long as your base color coat is thick enough, the stripes are not too thick and you work quick enough for the polishes to be wet throughout the swirling. I had some air bubbles after I drew the spirals, but I simply “popped” them again with the toothpick. The polish was still wet enough to run into place and hide the flaws.

The most time-consuming part of this technique is waiting for it to dry to apply top coat. These are quite thick layers of wet polish, and even with Seche Vite, which usually never smears and is supposed to go on wet polish, I dragged off most of the polish again during my first test. So better wait around ten minutes before applying your top coat.

Also, make sure you have a kitchen towel ready to wipe off the brush of your extra colors, as you might pick up some of the other colors and don’t want to put a dirty brush back in the bottle. 🙂

I love, love, love the result, especially if you compare it to the time-consuming mess that is water marbling. I will sure try this technique again, next time probably with more contrasting colors. 🙂

Base coat: p2 hands & nails calcium gel
Used colors: essie 99 Mint Candy Apple, essence colour & go 106 free hugs, essence colour & go 138 L.O.L
Top coat: Seche Vite