Water Marble with American Apparel Malibu Green + Sally Hansen Whirlwind White

I really couldn't decide what to do with my nails last night. I had a kind of... nail painting block? Usually I have so many ideas... These days I don't really know what to do. I don't even feel like buying more polish... something must be wrong with me haha

Anyway since I haven't done a water marble mani in forever that's what I went with

Instead of using tape around my nails I decided to try applying a generous amount of Vaseline to keep the water marble polish from sticking to my skin. In a way this worked better because it was more precise and much easier to get it right along the edge of my nails, and I could apply it on my cuticles and under my nails. Unfortunately, wiping it away was trickier than I thought it would be. You need to wipe away from the nail, and don't lift off that tissue/paper towel until you are at least at your second knuckle! I tried wiping sideways, along my cuticle, and the polish that was on my skin ended up rolling up into a wad and landing on my nail. That is what happened on my right middle finger. I tried to wipe off the wad of polish and ended up with no marble there just the base coat was left. Blah. On a few of my other nails I lifted the paper towel off my skin too soon and the leftover polish stretched into this kind of goo and again landed on my nail. And that led to more blank spots. There are also a few blank spots due to accidentally getting Vaseline on the nail.

So because it was my first time trying this with Vaseline instead of taping around the nail, this ended up a bit sloppy in terms of random blank spots and ruined the final result a bit. I think I also maybe swirled a bit too much on my right hand as you can see on my right ring finger. I like my lines really fine when water marbling but I think maybe I did too much. I managed to only dip 6x though (thumbs and pinkies alone; index, middle, and ring fingers together) which saved a lot of time. Now that I've got dipping multiple fingers mastered maybe I will marble more often :)

***EDIT I forgot to mention that I also used 2 drops of Malibu Green for every 1 drop of Whirlwind White when I was making my "bulls-eye" on the water for my left hand. For my right hand I just used 1 drop of each polish for each ring. I think that made the stripes of green thicker and more vibrant on my left hand. Also I really like the gradient fade on my left index finger. I somehow "popped" one of the rings on my "bulls-eye" when I was trying to create the marble design and so the colors were kind of bleeding together in one of the rings. I wonder if I could somehow master that technique....?***