Glitterquarium Nails

Been wanting to try this for a very long time, but as always, so afraid of failure I couldn’t bring myself to try. But then saw this Glitterquarium kit online, found the source and decided to have a go. I love it. This is my first attempt so, as always, there is room to improve. But it holds the liquid and the glitter and functions as a snow globe with a tank and I am well chuffed.

The kit itself was out of stock, so I watched the creator do a few instructional videos on YouTube and bought the bits I needed separately, and then because they are precious to me, tried to recreate it using cheaper products, so when I commit to using the proper stuff, it should be even easier than this attempt.

This took me about 3 hours to make this nail, maybe even longer, but at least 3 hours. I wasn’t rushing though. I wanted it work so I was taking my time.

I used a tip supplied from Glitteraquarium – I have a few and chose a size that wouldn’t fit my fingers so as not to waste the ones I will use. I cleaned and painted the inside of the tip with no wipe top coat so that if the liquid inside caused it to go cloudy, the tip would be protected and still clear. I wanted to create a scene at the back of the nails rather than just have them clear, so found a few You Tube videos and decided on my plan.

First layer was painted onto a laminated sheet, I used a variety of top coat, base coat for the clear layers and then went in with a turquoise blue nail gel. Over the top of this I went in with a purple magnetic and tried to create bubble / wave effects. This failed. But the purple was a glittery sparkly colour and it looked good, so I cured it and carried on.

My theme for this was ocean. So I had a look through my sticker book for suitable stickers and unbelievably – didn’t have a single ocean themed sticker in my collection. No fish, seaweed, starfish shells or anything. So I decided to use some 5D flowers that I know I won’t use to save on waste and stuck them down. I sealed them with a layer of base coat. I fucked this part up because I didn’t remove the sticky layer from the base coat, but only realised after I had built my tank about couldn’t do anything about it.

Next was attaching the nail. So I positioned it where I wanted it, set up my mini lamp to flash cure, applied another layer of base coat and popped the tip on, and flash cured. Checked it over, happy, and did the full cure. I then sealed the edges on the outside with a couple of layers of top coat as I could see some gaps at the edges.

I decided to fill the bottom end (free edge), rather than the nail bed end before filling and did this with a layer of acrygel. Clear and tough and a small area so not so difficult to do. Once I was happy I cut away the overhanging edges from the sides as best I could.

I plugged the open end with lint fee cloth and filed that bad boy back down to being a nail shape. Pleased with the results but if you look very closely (as I like to do) there is a small overhang from the back still at the side of the nail. But it looked beautiful and I was scared of over filing and going through the seal.

Time to fill. I used the Glitterquarium filling gel for this, and their glitter as I did not want this to be the reason the nails failed at this point. I filled almost to the top and added 3 scoops (small measuring spoon from Temu). I would probably add more next time as it isn’t glittery enough for me looking at the finished nail now.

Then it was time to seal. I cleaned the back of the tip to remove any liquid and decided to try acrygel. This was a disaster as the product just fell into the liquid. You can see this from the rather large bubble of product in the tank. I scooped what I could out with my tweezers , tried to create a surface, tried not to spill the liquid and flash cured and repeated until I had an almost complete seal.

I added a couple of layers of top coat over the top to make it shiny and hopefully seal any holes. The moment of truth. I tipped my nail up and… It worked! It didn’t leak, the glitter moved and it functioned as a snow globe. Wow! I did it. Sadly the product in the tank took up the space of the air bubble so the glitter moves very slowly, and the glitter stuck to the back plate where I had used base coat instead of no wipe top coat. But it works.

It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be at all. I love this.

Ideas:

So the scope of design ideas for this is pretty mega. This kind of effect could be used for so many designs, thought I’d list a few here so I could have a point of reference for when I hit a creative block.

Seascape – fish, ocean, beach, mermaid – could do scenes, hide treasure or shells in a sand moving base, underwater scenes, jellyfish – anything.

Halloween / horror – could be used for vomit, blood, witches hair or faces or hats, pumpkins, spells and magic – all sorts

Sky – galaxies, planets – i/.e swirling planets, star-scapes, fluffy glittery clouds, sunshine, rain – anything moving sky related

Christmas – could be the glittery green of a tree or the sparkly baubles, presents, wrapping, magic effects, nutcracker, elves, santa – anything really.

Graffiti – could be used to create backgrounds or highlight bits i.e. text.

Jewels – could be used to create shifting gem centres.

Dragons – could use to create sparkly wings, closing eyes or eyes with glitter, highlight metallic gel.

The options really are endless. The only down side is that the nails have to be quite long to allow for the creation of the tank. However – I have ordered some pre-made tank nail tips from Temu and some ocean themed nail stickers. A foiled background might also be a good way to create a scene on the back of the nails so I’ve ordered a few different designs for them too. I’ve also discovered they do NFC activated LED light stickers for nails, that turn on when they are near an NFC (near field communication) source – like a card reader or a mobile phone so I’ll be experimenting with these too. A snow globe nail with a light in it. OMG. Complexity overload. Can’t wait for those to arrive and try them out.

I feel like these would be nails that would need planning, you couldn’t just wing it – they would need to all work together and have a theme, so that might be interesting to explore also. I wonder if it would be possible to cut little semi circles out of laminate to use to seal the open end once filled, or at least to make it a bit easier.

Also, just want to point out that the ordinarily these nails would be painted on top, so all of the little blemishes would be hidden and only parts of the nail would have moving glitter. I am undecided whether or not to do that with this one, I’m considering if it would be a waste of time to carry on with this prototype, or if it’s worth completing the whole project. I’ll update on here if I do anyway.