For all my friends longing for – or on the cusp of – a nice, relaxing beach day. Me, I don’t do beaches. Me + sun = crispy red lobster, so I tend to abstain. I’m also totally that pooh that sits there in a long-sleeved rash guard, sarong, wide-brimmed hat and SPF 70, fussily rotating the beach umbrella into the shade every 23 and a half minutes.
So no actual beaches for me! But I’m quite content with this very beachy manicure, which utilizes a new-to-me technique, water spotting. In water spotting, you drop a few polish droplets onto the surface of water (here a basic white creme to mimic the sudsy surf rushing ashore a sandy beach.) Then taking a spray perfume or cologne, spritz onto the surface of the polish, creating a semi-transparent, lacy effect like the rushing surf. Then you dip your painted nails into the polish as you would with a water marble manicure. And since no shoreline would be complete without at least a few seashells and starfish, I added a few of those, too. Surf’s up!
Finger Candy 
I really like your nails! And I’m the same with the sun – hello, red-head genes. I burn instantly too >.>.
Thank you! Oh, the sun…necessary for life, terrible for our skin! Why can’t there be a happy medium?!
Perfect! Love them
Ahh. So I’m not the only pasty pale gal who also burns super easy. And after I burn it’s replaced by several freckles. I hiss at the sun as we just do not get along lol so I try to avoid it as much as possible yet the beach is super beautiful to listen to the waves so the best time to go is closer to when the sun goes down. Also chasing crabs crabs hunting with flash lights is also fun. We let them go we don’t keep them!
Hey there, another vampire, right on! I love the beach, too, but really just to walk on, or stare contemplatively at the sunset from.
Lol funny you call me that, that’s what my family calls me when I’m like, “eww.. another sunny day!”🤣🤣🤣 I love dark, rainy days. Perfect for snuggling, reading and movie watching!
I used to be acquaintances with someone with whom I had a pretty contentious relationship, and she ragged on me all the time about how pale and sickly I looked. One day I snapped and told her if she kept hitting the tanning bed every day, she was going to die of skin cancer. Nasty, but honest, and guess what? SHE NEVER GAVE ME SHIT AGAIN. Pale people of the world unite!
Wow, but hey sometimes you gotta stand your ground and just be bold and out there! Good for you! It’s true though, tanning is just soo bad for you!
Hmm, it was DEFINITELY a super jerky thing for me to say, but she wasn’t very nice to me either. Then again, that was 20 years ago. Lessons learned since then. 🙂
I have no idea what you’re referring to, tecnique-wise, but you make it sound easy and these are ethereally pretty, sporting just the right touch of shoreline gems.
There’s nothing worse than a crowded sweaty beach. We don’t live near any and rarely go, but I like the idea of a secluded beach, a mix of sun/shade, perfect ocean waves…just never experienced that scenario. I do okay with swimming pools, you probably don’t get much swimming weather in your corner of the country though?
Oh yak, sweaty beach. That’s sort of my idea of hell – hot, sun-drenched beach, sweaty, sunburned, semi-naked people, sharks lurking just beyond the shoreline, ready to nibble my tenderest bits…it’s that scene in Jaws when they SHOULD HAVE CLOSED THE BEACHES, but regrettably didn’t. Tangent?
I actually had a pool in high school and most of university. We’d only have it open for a few months a year (June, July, August, a bit of September), which made the constant maintenance kind of a bitch, but it was a huge gathering point for my friends and I. So many awesome summers in that pool. 🙂
Lol, a bitch indeed. It was quite a jubilant mood the day my husband took an axe to our above ground pool. These days, I swim at my sister’s who has two teen sons for pool boys, nothing for me to do but lounge.
Now, that’s how you do it! Of course, it might be even more fun for those two pool boys to be strapping, tanned young men named Enrico and Dante bearing cooling palm fronds and iced grapes than your teenaged nephews, but we take what we can get, yes? 😉
This is so pretty! I’ve also been playing with waterspotting recently, but am still working on gettting that “lacy” effect you talk about. I did a mani for my Canada Day collage, but it looked like blood spatter! Not good.
Yeah, I think I may have needed a bit more polish to really get that lacy look – this is a bit sheer, although it works. But keeping it sheer means it’d probably work well as a true kind of marbled effect – like marble tiles. That’s actually what I see here more than anything!
Le sigh. These are so serenely gorgeous. My nails finally started growing out (read: I finally stopping tearing at my nails again) and they are coated in lovely polish but no where near as lovely as this. Will you paint me some mermaid nails one day?
I will totally do you (do you?) up some mermaid nails! Do you have a colour preference? I’m thinking pale teal/turquoise, right? 🙂