If you don’t have time to get your nails done professionally before a special event, don’t worry, there are loads of fabulous nail design ideas that are easy to do at home!

Here’s one of our current favourites – a marbled look without tools!

The video below gives a clear demonstration of how to do this nail design idea on gel-nails, and here’s the easy step-by-step for ordinary or acrylic nails.

(The only difference is that with gel-nails, they have to be ‘cured’ under a special UV light.)

Gold, Pink, Purple & Glitter – No Tools Marble Effect

1. Paint on a good quality base coat.  This will make your manicure last longer and prevent any ‘yellowing’ of your natural nails.
2. Then apply one of the latest metallic nail varnish colours, in this video we are using glamorous gold nail polish.
3. Apply one or two coats, until you have a good dense base of gold colour.
4. Let it dry completely, before you start on the marbling effect.
5. Now for the fun part!  Dab on some pink, purple and glitter polish in random dotted ‘smudges’ on your golden nails.  (See the video below for exactly what to do.)
6. Then give the ‘colour smudges’ time to dry completely.

Top tip:  Don’t make the smudges too thick or they’ll take hours to dry!

1. And then all you need to do is to cover your marbled nails with a high quality top coat to seal your artistic nail design and you’re all ready to party!

Marble Effect without Tools

This is a video that shows how easy it is to do marbled nails.  It comes from Lorena Marquez who works for the beauty brand, Entity. So watch now, to see Lorena create a fabulous marble effect design – without tools!

Hot metal

Metallics are hot now and will be even hotter in next year’s Spring & Summer 2014 nail collections.  We know this from the fabulous Dior SS14 Fashion Show, where the models were sent down the runway with fabulous metallic eye-makeup and nails.

You can use any metallic nail polish shade for the base like, gold, silver, copper, bronze or shiny gunmetal grey that are currently all over the fashionable fingernails of the rich and famous!

Versatile

The great thing about marbling is that you can chop and change the colours to suit your outfit or your mood. And it’s a great way to use up whatever colours you’ve got at the back of your nail polish cupboard, too!

So like I said, easy to do and very glamorous!