Camouflage nails tutorial

 

In this post I will explain how to make your nails invisible! Or, well, as invisible as camo gets. The process is super easy and quick and basically requires no skill or talent to achieve.

The technique is called “smooshy marble” and it’s one of the many ways you can get a look with several colours touching each other in erratic ways but still distinct.

I don’t want to make a lengthy introduction so you can get directly to the topic, so for this design you will need the following:

 

I used a beige, an olive green and an army green nail polish:

• Mixture made by myself that got tarnished and I desperately wanted to get rid of
• Wild & Young (previously known as Pinkduck) Wild Life Nº406
• Wild & Young (previously known as Pinkduck) Major Collection Nº336

Of course, you don’t need the exact same polishes I used, that would be a fool’s errand. This technique is quite versatile and works with basically any combination of colours, I just like these together.

The last tool, and the magic for this, is a stamper. Mine is a cheap one that I got on AliExpress years ago, and honestly, it’s slightly damaged now, but it still works for this technique. Mine is a clear one, but that is not needed. You can use whichever you have available to you or prefer.

After your base coat, you may apply one of the colours of the marble. I’d suggest the lightest one, or the one with the least opacity in your design. In my case, it is the beige mixture:

 

Do not worry about making the coat perfect. This is not a necessary step, but I encourage you to take the extra step for a couple of reasons: first, it will help build up a polish that might not be the most opaque but you want in your design, and second, it will hide your natural nail if you miss a spot on your nail in the following steps!

Then, you will grab the stamper and all the polishes, and you’re gonna place dots of the shades on the stamper head, like this:

 

I will admit that there’s not enough of the beige shade, and this is not intentional. I just didn’t have enough polish in the bottle to drop more. You can change the result altering the proportions and distribution of the polishes on your stamper.

And now, work quickly, and stamp it on your nails! You can stamp sections still on the stamper on barren places on the nail or just if you don’t like how a section turned out! You’ll end up with something like this:

 

Be warned that this technique most likely will get on your skin, but it’s quite easy to remove from it. Also, you can tell the texture on my swatch stick, due to sections where I stamped again and readjusted. That’s totally normal and will be dealt with by adding your top coat. Which… is your last step!

 

For this particular colour scheme and concept, I decided to go with a matte top coat, so you can see the result! Make sure to wait some minutes before applying and float it to avoid smudging your design and transfering it to the brush.

And that’s it! As I said, very fast and easy to do!

I have done this nail art before on my natural nails, so I dug up a couple of pictures of it. Believe it or not, these are the same polishes *and* camera! For some reason, today’s pictures got really dark for no particular reason. I used the same polishes but the beige started as more of a green shade. And my hand is better lit.