Holiday cheer mani ft. Born Pretty emoji plate

Hello Readers!

Today's manicure is to celebrate the excitement that I- and my children- are feeling right now with Christmas just around the corner! My kids had their last day of school before the break yesterday, so the excitement is in full swing over here.

I feel like the starry-eyed smiley sums it up nicely. 

My base color for this mani is a new polish from the Kandee Johnson line that I picked up at Walgreens. It is called "mint chip" and has a lovely satin finish that I am not showing in this mani because I did use a glossy topcoat. I was also trying out a new stamping polish today, just the Born Pretty store black. I love how pigmented it is! Unfortunately it did smudge even though it was completely dry when I added topcoat. ;( Also, I noticed that because it is so pigmented it is harder to remove from my skin. I could make this easier by using liquid latex so maybe next time I'll have to break that out. 

So my stamping plate for this mani is from Born Pretty Store, and has lots of super fun emoji images on it:

I was excited to see this plate on the Born Pretty website, because I have been eyeing the emoticon plates from MoYou London's geek line, but I kind of felt like I maybe didn't need quite so many different emojis. Their plates have an entire plate of single emojis that are all the same size, and another plate with the smaller emojis in the full nail image. I like this plate because it mixes full nail images of smaller emojis with the larger images, if that makes sense. So I only have to buy one plate and I'm all set!

I also used this Christmas typography plate to stamp behind the decal on my middle finger, though it's kind of hard to see, because I wanted to add a little bit of Christmas to the design:

Challenge Your Nail Art: Christmas Lights

Hello Readers!

Today's post is for the Challenge Your Nail Art group on Facebook, and the prompt is "Christmas lights!"

When I planning this mani, I thought it would be fun to do a "zoom-out" nail where I give the lights some context. In my case, my lights are on this little snowy house. I also considered putting them on a Christmas tree, but I didn't really like any of the options I had for Christmas trees to pair with these lights, so I went with the house. 

Here is a quick look at the polishes used in this mani:

I started off with two coats of the Essie "Going Guru", except on my ring finger which has Revlon Parfumarie's "Tropical Rain" for a base. Next I stamped from the Bundle Monster Christmas typography plate onto all my green nails:

I created a decal to place across the nails using this Bundle Monster plate:

I actually only stamped the lights image twice, since I was placing them lengthwise, and cut each decal in half . I did add in some extra stamping of the pine needles because they were looking oddly "cut off" in some places on my nails.

On my ring, I painted a snow line on the lower half and place a decal of a house from this plate over that:

Then I added some little red dots to my house to represent the Christmas lights using a toothpick.

Simple Sunday: Poinsettia featuring Bundle Monster's Winter Holiday Collection

Hello Readers!

I'm here today with a super simple Sunday manicure with a Christmas flavor, because December!

This mani features some pretty shimmery polishes from Sinful Color's holiday display this year. I am loving "I Pine For You", that gorgeous sparkly pine-green color!

All I did for this mani was stamp from this Bundle Monster Holiday plate featuring typography:

Which by the way, now that I'm looking at it I'm thinking I may try to isolate some of these phrases for a holiday mani later, to pair with something else on the nail though because they are *super* tiny. There's a lot of fun ones, though- even "Bah Humbug" and "mele kalikimaka" for a hawiian christmas mani!

I added a poinsettia decal created by isolating an image on this plate:

...and that's it! As I said, super simple this week and very Christmas!