I can haz water marble?

So back before Halloween, I mentioned something about me trying to do a water marble. I wanted to do a neat little multi-color glow-in-the-dark one with those Blue Cross pumpkin polishes. It was a spectacular failure. As it was my very first attempt at one ever, I had no idea why. There could have been any number of reasons. And just in case it was the polishes that caused the flop (those pumpkin polishes are cheap, okay) I tried a few Essies and still couldn't really get it working. I had one nail that was sorta done but it was terrible. Dana tried to help as much as she could but as she said herself, it's hard to troubleshoot from five states away. I gave up on it and decided to try another day.


Today was that day, friends. I was going to figure this out. I decided the best thing to do was to use polishes I had that I already knew would work so I could take that possibility out of the equation. Yep, I tried a Ludurana water marble using the Aurora Boreals.

Short and sweet tangent for a moment here, if you don't own these and are at all interested, do yourself a favor and buy them. I had only a mild interest, I've of course googled for swatches and seen all of Dana's work with them, but it was still only mild. They didn't look that impressive. Dana talked me into buying them and am I glad she did. These things are gorgeous in person, the pictures do them almost no justice. I'm a convert.

Back to business. I gathered my supplies, including an on-sale bottle of evian just in case it turned out that it was something in my tap water causing the problem, and sat down to work. Base black (Essie Licorice), etc etc. Watch a video, even the one in Dana's original post, they explain it completely. Then to the water. And to my complete irritation, I had the same issue as before.

The first drop spread out into barely there nothingness but all of the ones that followed just sat there in the center, gobbing into each other and being uncooperative. Text text with Dana for a morale boost....which was just long enough for the water to cool off to the temperature it should have been.

Wait. What?

I apparently have nothing more than an academic idea of what room temperature actually is. I know it's like 65-70F degrees, sure. But I thought it meant slightly on the warm side. No, stupid, it's slightly on the cool side. So guess what?

Water marble achievement unlocked! Hooray that I'm not that big of an idiot and stuff. It's not perfect, I did smutch it in a few spots and got overly enthusiastic about clean up in a lot of places, but at least I now know what I'm doing and more importantly what I'm doing wrong. It's one of those things about watching a video:  you forget those people have done this a billion times and it looks so easy to do. It's not. Well, once you figure it out it is. Just, sheesh.

Two more things before I wrap this up.

First, in none of the videos I watched do I remember them discussing the clean up for one of these. A light touch here and there and a brief mention, but not the before and after. Because dear god, two hours of detail work with pointy q-tips is almost not worth it.

And that doesn't even show the polish stains halfway up my fingers! What a mess.

Second, I sent Dana a set of those pumpkin polishes as she doesn't have Rite Aids where she lives. I asked her to, at some point whenever she felt like playing, give them a try and see if she could get them to work in one of these. Just in case it was me, see. It wasn't. They didn't.

Jess