Water Marble Nail Art

A fool's errand.

ONCE UPON A TIME, two sisters got permission from their parents to purchase three bottles of nail polish that cost Rs. 50 each, from a fancy shop in a fancy mall.

“Do you have slow-drying nail polish?” they asked the salesperson.

“No no, don’t worry,” she said. “All our nail polish will dry fast. Insta dry.”

“No,” they smiled, aware of the strangeness of the request, “we want it to dry slowly.”

“Um….”

She was bewildered. She had been instructed to tell customers what they wanted to hear, but if she turned around and claimed that the polish would dry slowly, the girls wouldn’t believe her. They put her out of her misery and bought it anyway.

Back at home, the sisters took a plastic cup and filled it with water. They rummaged in the medicine cabinet for a toothpick, which would be critical for their endeavour. They were excited to have new, high quality nail polish to work with. The older sister opened one bottle and carefully held the brush a couple of centimeters above the surface of the water in the cup. The younger sister watched with rapt attention.

The polish slid down the brush and gathered at the end, where it hung for a few seconds before it plopped into the water below. Then, in the most anti-climactic moment of my life (this is, of course, about me and my sister), the drop of polish sank, intact, to the bottom of the cup.

This was not supposed to happen. A few months prior, I had stumbled across a website called videos.google.com, where one could find videos about anything. Even in those innocent days, I was at the mercy of the Algorithm, defenseless when it tossed quicksand into my path in the form of Water Marble Nail Art.

Water Marble Nail Art sounds harmless. Some genius figured out that the density and hydrophobicity of nail polish are such that it can float if dropped onto water, spreading out in a thin layer thanks to surface tension. If you drop another colour on top of the first, they will not mix, but form distinct, concentric rings, because physics.

You can make marvellous patterns by dragging the layers of polish around with a toothpick. Then, if you dip your nail into the water, by some black magic, the polish will be transferred onto your nail while the water will remain in the cup.

Needless to say, this is a utopic description of how the process should work. If you try this shit at home, it is more likely to proceed like this.

The magicians offer ‘tips and tricks’ like use slow-drying nail polish, use warm water, use cold water, use the distilled tears of Aphrodite. Not only are these tips useless—they give you false hope, so you spend hours surrounded by cups of water and all the nail polish you own, and increasingly dirty toothpicks, until your husband asks in the politest way possible, what the hell you are doing.

That’s right. Twelve years have passed since the day my sister and I learnt the meaning of frustration, and I still haven’t given up. I am married, and have a full time job, and can afford a professional manicure with UV-cured nail polish and a complementary shoulder massage. But I have stayed hungry. Stayed foolish.

And at the ripe age of 29, with tears in my eyes and nail polish stains on my coffee table, I have succeeded.

If you are feeling tempted to take up nail painting, think again. It is a hobby rife with disappointment. The tiny flaws in the manicure pictured above may be invisible to your eyes, but they draw mine like desserts in a grocery store.

Want to make the same pattern on all ten nails? Good luck. Want to use nail polish you bought in 2019, to put to rest such baseless accusations as “You keep buying new nail polish and don’t use the old ones”? It’ll come out uneven, and get progressively worse as you try to fill in the gaps. Want to go to bed less than one hour after doing the top coat? Hello, fingerprints.

Social media will mesmerise you with fleeting dreams of unattainable glory. Even if you have the sense to stay away from Water Marble, you will be exposed to unlimited shots of a perfect brush gliding over perfect nails, depositing glossy layers of non-clumpy polish, in colours that can only be described as delicious.

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A post shared by @abe.nailbabe

These nuisances, however, pale in comparison to the tragedy of the broken nail.

Once you enter this world, there is no going back. You grow your nails out with patience and dedication, asking people to open coke cans for you and ignoring the weird looks that result from this. The vitamins your doctor prescribed make your nails stronger, which is greater motivation to take your pills than anything the doctor could have said. You learn how to file your nails without causing ‘micro-tears’.

You take every possible excuse to glance at your nails and sigh to yourself with joy. Then you go to open the microwave while looking at your phone, and before you know it, your finger is crashing into the plastic door, nail first, and this happens:

What was once your best, most elegant nail now looks like the black crayon that got used up before all the others in the box (or was that just me?). If such devastation befalls you, you have a few options:

1. Live in denial, eat your vitamins and wait for the broken nail to attain its erstwhile magnificence. When you accept that it’s a losing battle:

2. Chop the other nails and start afresh. Be more mindful of microwaves.

3. Get a professional manicure; drown your sorrows in retail therapy. Bonus: tell your sob story to the manicurist, who probably has a soft spot for such things.

Or, you can write a blog post about it.

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