Turquoise Stone Nails with Essie Where's My Chauffeur

I did this turquoise stone nail art for last year's #PolishTogether December birthstone theme. I followed this tutorial here. It was my first time trying it out and it was kind of a hit and miss. Sometimes it'd turn out nice and I liked the way it looked. Sometimes the black veins didn't come out looking too good or looked too close together, so I had to redo the whole nail. The overall end result is still not very even looking, but I let it pass cos I could have literally spent hours re-doing them til they looked perfect. My right hand nails were a little bit worse off than my left cos I couldn't be bothered after a while. Haha!

I didn't shoot any step-by-step pics but here are the steps in short (or read the tutorial i linked above for a more visual breakdown):

• paint nails with base colour preferably a turquoise colour and let dry
• randomly dab on some gold colour on each nail and let dry
• have a cup of water ready (I used tap water at room temperature)
• tape the sides of your nails to make cleanup easier later (I used lip balm all around the edges instead)
• get your black polish, toothpick and alcohol product ready (Tutorials mostly recommend hairspray, but I didn't have any, so I used my Clinique clarifying lotion (!!!) instead. I had a little bit left, tried it and it worked for me)
• drop one-two drops of black polish over the water in the cup and let it spread
• once it's sufficiently spread out, take your spray and spray over the spread-out black polish. This will create breaks on the surface of the black polish
• quickly dip your finger in
• get the toothpick and use it to gather the black stuff that's still floating on the water before taking your finger out
• clean up leftover polish around nail, let dry
• apply topcoat

Sounds like a lot of work huh? Don't worry, you get the hang of it after a while.

I used Essie Where's My Chauffeur as my base colour, a random gold polish and A-England Camelot for the black.

This is the look prior to applying the black veins. I lightly dabbed on the gold with a sponge.

And the finished look is below.

Like I mentioned, it's not very even. The black veins on my last two nails look much darker than the rest. This is because sometimes the black polish would clump together when I'm taking my finger out of the water, creating a much darker pattern.

This is how I wish all my nails would have turned out. Nicely spread out black veins.

The overall look isn't too bad though. It was worth the effort to me. I loved looking at my nails.