Lava lamp nails tutorial

 Today's tutorial is slightly more experimental than usual. This is a nail look I was going to try on myself but I personally think this would look way better on longer, more slender nails. Now that I'm officially someone with short nails, I don't think the results would satisfy my mental image prior to my nails having grown already. So that's why we're doing it on my trusty swatch sticks!

This nail look could be considered more complex and probably a mixture of different techniques, so let's go step by step. It's really simple and require barely any tool to work! The true magic comes in the polish selection:

The polishes you will need for the best effect are a jelly, a neon and a metallic. You can go for whichever color combo you find more appealing, but I'd recommend for your jelly to be on the transparent side, not one of those milky shades due to the way we're gonna recreate the look. Mine are as follows:

• Dilution of Wild & Young (previously known as Pinkduck) XOX Nº11
• Deliplus Neón Nº218
• Wild & Young Metal collection Nº300

And I've used a dotting tool. You can also add a detailer brush if you feel more comfortable with that implement.

How did I create that jelly polish? I personally used dollar store top coat, as it's basically not quick dry at all. You can use clear nail polish if you so desire, but this was the cheapest option available to me and it honestly worked great. The proportion is deceiving: That barely has drops of the green on almost a full bottle of clear. You will want to experiment on your own.

Let's begin the actual tutorial, we want a layer of the jelly. By definition, it will be sheer. My swatch sticks are clear, your nail has a colour and a nail line and that will alter the look:

Now, what we want to do is to use our neon shade and the dotting tool to paint some irregular dots. I'd recommend making it sparse. Don't worry too much about making them perfect, you want them to not be!

 

You can do the same steps another time: add another layer of the jelly and then more dots of the neon. You don't really need to focus too much on the cuticle area or the tip of the nail, just make sure your shapes are not identical and that you can overlap some just a tiny bit!

 

I will tell you that this technique is basically a clone of what it's known in the community as jelly sandwich, but instead of using a topper or glitter, I did dots! If you want an actual jelly sandwich tutorial, please do let me know, it's a very simple technique that will elevate your nail art game and requires literally no talent. You can do an optional step here that I will disclose later on, but let's go back to the tutorial now:

 

With my metallic, I painted a thin french tip and also a similar shape in the cuticle area, to emulate the solid, opaque parts of the lava lamp. Use the tools you need to make the best lines you can, and don't hesitate to give your metallic a second layer if you feel like the opacity is not enough to satisfy you. This would be your finished look after a top coat!

So, let's analyze this look under different lights! I have a black light flashlight and this is what happens!

You can see that the green parts of the nail are glowing, and it's because of the neon polish. That's why you want it to be a neon, in particular. If you're not interested in this gimmick, you do not need it, but the brightness adds a lot to the final look even in regular light. And also, my jelly comes from a very particular polish that's not neon, but also reacts to black light similarly. This is a very old experiment that I did before even getting this black light flashlight! But I can tell you that they can be quite inexpensive online, if you're interested on getting one, too.

 

This picture was taken in darkness with only the black light, and it potentially threw off any kind of colour balance of my camera, as it looks quite blue toned in general, but you can still see the green cast of the polishes. In real life it looked a bit different, more akin to the previous picture, honestly.

And here, a little easter egg and my little lie: Remember when I said that you could do an optional step before painting with the metallic? I did add a glow in the dark topper, specifically Holo Taco's Glow in the dark taco, which also glows green because in this blog, what else? And this is what I could capture in that dark room after turning off the black light:

The quality is not the best, I gotta admit, but think that this camera doesn't know what to do without light. The metallic, for the most part, hides the glow, aside from on the borders, but that can be explained by the transparency of the jelly and the swatch stick, so the light you see is escaping from below the metallic, reflecting on the white surface below! As it's on all the nail, you lose the separation between jelly and neon, because what's glowing is the topper, and none of those two polishes react in darkness whatsoever.

In any case, I hope my ramblings about layering polishes and its effects have been entertaining and informative! I might do some sort of blog post explaining in part what can you expect to do with a polish depending on its base characteristics, like, expecting certain finishes not to gradient well and so. I would need to experiment a lot for that but I would be up to it if there's demand!

Thanks for reading this kind of nail design that I have been craving on my nails and haven't been able to make, I'm giving you the means to beat me to it, take them and tag me on it if you do! I'd love to see your recreations!