So Mason is off to his first ever Easter egg hunt this coming weekend, and for probably the first time we are getting into the spirit of the celebration. This involves a lot of eggs, both of the chocolate variety and… er… normal, variety. As my boy has a somewhat short attention span, we’ve needed to be varied in how we approach the tradition of decorating eggs. We’ve tried so many different ways of doing it. We posted earlier in the week about Decorating Eggs with Shaving Foam, which was super fun and very messy. Today, it’s egg decorating with nail polish.

No we’re not just painting them like you’d paint your nails (though that is an option) but instead, we’re using a technique to produce an excellent marbled finish with minimal effort.

And, like our previous post, if there’s a girl in the house, then you’ll have basically everything you need. I never wear nail polish and even I could dig out two 

• Nail polish. As many colours as you like.
• A fairly deep old tupperware that you don’t need anymore.
• Lukewarm water.
• Eggs. Obviously.
• A bamboo skewer or two.
• Rubber gloves. Unless you don’t mind scrubbing nail varnish off for hours.

This egg decorating with nail polish technique is so easy, it’s ridiculous.

Hard boil your eggs. Nothing fancy, just make sure they’re solid all the way through. You’re probably not going to eat them so it doesn’t really matter.

Whilst they’re cooling, fill your tupperware with lukewarm water. From the tap is fine, again nothing fancy. You need a deeper one so that you can submerge your egg fully inside, covering it in nail varnish in one go.

Then, one of your nail polishes and pour a few drops into the warm water. Some will sink, but most will float on the top and start to disperse. Repeat this with all of the colours that you want to use on your egg.

Once the colours are all floating on top (and try and make sure they cover the whole surface of your tupperware), use your skewer to swirl the colours together to get that all important marbling effect. When it looks how you’d like, carefully dip your egg into the centre of the coloured polish. Let the egg sink and all of the polish should cover the rest of the egg, but use your skewer to guide it if you need.

Once you’re happy with the coverage, fish your egg out of the water and leave it to dry on a clean, surface that won’t stick to your egg. Definitely not kitchen roll (made that mistake) or a tea towel. Your worktop will do. The nail polish is going to be super sticky, so leave your egg alone for a couple of hours at least to make sure it dries completely.  

Repeat for each egg you want to decorate. You don’t need to change the water, but by the end of it your tupperware will be covered with the polish that has sunk and it’s probably not worth trying to clean it.

Make sure you experiment with a bunch of different polishes. The joy with this type of egg decorating is that you can get some awesome effects, especially with metallic and glitter polishes.

And make sure you share your results, so I can borrow (I mean, steal) your awesome ideas.