After the success of my last mani, I just had to try out another water spotted mani to go with the Whats Up Nails March Nail Art Challenge prompt. I went into this with the plan to do something completely and totally different from these ones, but I didn't realize just how much these were going to look like a different technique entirely in the end. Funny how that works, right? Anyway, I feel like it's a pretty solid example of how the exact same technique, with a couple of tweaks, can give you entirely different results!

Keep reading to check it out!

One of my favorite bases for a springtime mani is this 3 color rainbow gradient look - it has a ton of impact but it's actually a pretty easy base to do and only requires three polishes. It's also a technique you can use with different depths and tones of your three primary colours for distinctly different looks. I star by applying the lighter of the two shades I'll be using on each nail as a base (in this case, yellow for any nails with yellow in them and pink otherwise.) After letting my base polish dry, I use three different makeup sponges to make the gradient - one for each colour pairing that ends up being on my nails. In this case, it took three coats of sponging to get to my desired opacity and blend. After that, I cleaned up and crisped up my edges.

For the water spotting, I made sure to choose a white polish that has good pigmentation but isn't too thick or chalky, because you obviously need it to spread over the surface of the water and then break up. Instead of using aerosol hairspray this time, I used a bottle of liquid hand sanitizer and it definitely performed very differently than the hairspray. I dipped each finger individually for this mani and then removed my liquid latex and crisped up the edges with a clean up brush dipped in acetone before moving onto the next nail.

Once I was finished with all of my dipping and cleaning up, I used a water based top coat to seal in the design so that it didn't smudge and get even foggier. Once that was fully dry, I added a layer of quick dry matte top coat to take down the shine, which I think really makes this design pop, and voila!

I'm in a weird state of absolutely madly in love with this mani and still in a bit of a frenemy relationship with the water spotting technique. I really do genuinely love both of the mani's I've done this week using this technique, but... I just hate it. If you've tried the water spotting technique, let me know in the comments how you feel about it!

If you want to see how I did this mani, head over to @pblnails on Instagram to check out the video tutorial!

Thanks for reading!