born in the 80's, tie dye nail art:

I'm off to Ireland tomorrow for a week but I had to take a break from cramming clothes into my teeny case to share this nail art tutorial with you because I'm just so damn excited! you may have noticed that tie dye has started to creep back into the high street, no it's not the 80's but it seems the fashion world is staging yet another revival. (as a closet hippy I'm quite excited at the prospect of getting out the fabric dye and tie dyeing my tees but for the moment I think these nails will have to suffice!)

to try this water marble technique you will need a few things. a small bowl, a bottle of still mineral water, white nail polish, assorted coloured nail polishes cocktail sticks, sellotape and a pair of hands!

before you start you need to paint your nails with white polish, this will be your base colour! when dry cover all of your thumb in sellotape apart from the white thumb nail. now your prepped for the fun part...

this is where the fun starts! pick out your favourite nail polish colours, start to drip them into the mineral water one colour at a time, work as fast as you can and be as random as you like! this is unpredictable and fun so don't get too worried, take a toothpick and in one gently sweeping motion swirl the colours slightly, just do this once as otherwise the polish sticks to the toothpick and ruins the pattern. 

ok; now you need to bite the bullet and take your prepped thumb and dip it into the bowl! dip your thumb in nail first and keep it as flat as possible so the nail hits the water evenly. leave it in for 5-10 seconds (while your thumb is submerged you can use your toothpick to drag the excess floating polish to the side of the bowl) now carefully scoop your thumb out of the water!! you'll have polish all over the sellotape at this point and you'll see why it pays off to cover your skin! remove the sellotape and tidy up the edges with a cotton bud dipped in nail polish remover. you're left with an awesome random pattern on your nail! 

simply repeat one finger at a time prepping each finger with sellotape each time, change the water between fingers if it gets messy with polish! some fingers will be better than others but anyone can try this you don't need to be good at painting nails!

each time you drip in the nail polish it will look different so experiment with colour and pattern (and if you're as messy as me leave out some newspaper!) in no time you'll have tie dye nails nailed!

I hope some of you will try it, trust me it's just as fun as finger painting was in nursery aha!

caroline x