26 Great Nail Art Ideas: Work-Appropriate Nail Art

Hello Readers!


Today's post is for the Crumpet's Nail Art/26 Great Nail Art Ideas Challenge, and the prompt is "Work Appropriate Nail Art." I debated a little bit about what I thought this meant; after all, I'm a stay-at-home Mom so really anything is appropriate for my job, but I thought I'd go with something classic for this look. I figured, what's more classic with red? Although all jobs will have different rules about fingernails, most wouldn't complain about a classic red polish.

I decided to pair my red with some black for a grown-up look, and stick with classic designs like lace and florals.

I started off with two coats of this Essie polish "Altitude Attitude", which was part of a Christmas collection and is in the mini size. I was pretty satisfied with the formula of this polish and I am liking how this color pops with the black stamping over it. For my ring finger I decided to go with a shimmery black instead of straight black; I used two coats of the Revlon polish.

My floral image on the ring finger comes from this newer Born Pretty Store plate; it's from their newest release. I find myself reaching for fillable florals a *lot*, so I figured it would come in handy.

My lace image comes from this MoYou London "Trend Hunter" collection plate. Now, you may notice that this is the smaller image plate, and my nails are getting a little bit longer right now. These images are currently too small for my middle finger nail, though they will still cover the pointer/pinky fingers, and possibly the ring finger. That's part of the reason I decided to do a french tip-esque look for this mani; you don't want full coverage anyway. however, I still could get away with using these smaller plates on longer nails by stamping the image twice to cover any missed portions. I've done this before with the lacy images and it's really hard to see where the two parts come together. It doesn't always work, but it does with most types of images.

And the finishing touch for this mani was the bands from this classic MoYou London "Frenchy" collection plate. I love this plate; it's really useful, but once again I find it difficult to use. It took me several tries to get good pick-up with these images and they are difficult to apply to the nail without messing up; just fair warning. I would still recommend it, with the advisory that it takes some extra patience.

I hope you enjoyed this look! After a week straight of wearing this mani during my vacation,  I was so ready for a change and I'm happy to have a fresh coat of polish on! Be sure to check out the other challenge entries in the link-up below!

An InLinkz Link-up

Beach Selfies ft. Bundle Monster Kawaii emoji

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Today I have a very summery mani inspired by the Bundle Monster Kawaii Emoji collection. I was trying to decided what I wanted to do, and flipping through the pin board on Pinterest I made of all my plates (because it's much easier to look through them on pinterest and really see the images than it is to look at them in real life), and I noticed the turtle image on the MoYou London Animal plate. I thought I could do a beachy themed mani with the turtles and the little camera.

I kind of imagine a beach goer stumbling upon a flock of freshly hatched turtles stumbling to the water and quickly pulling out her camera to get a shot of the amazing sight.

For this mani, I started off by painting all my nails with Sinful Colors "Mint2Bcool". I did a lot of my stamping today with Sinful Colors "Navy I Do", but also used an actual Bundle Monster stamping polish for the red stamping.

The adorable little camera image comes from the vacation themed Bundle Monster Kawaii Emoji plate. I think this is my favorite in the collection, though the fruit-and-veggie plate is a close second. I also used the little strips of tiny images along the bottom to decorate my french tipped pinky/pointer fingers... more on that later.

The turtles come from this MoYou London Animal plate. Some really cute images on here, but this is the first time I've featured it here because when I used it before it was on my right hand, thumb, and a couple of nail fails that I never published. ;)

The typography images on the pointer/pinky come from this Bundle Monster plate from the "Hangloose" collection. 

I pulled out my trusty MoYou London Frenchy 09 plate to help with the french tips. I decided to do these as decals and then place them over my nail rather than attempting to stamp the direct-to-nail, because I was concerned about messing up the placement and having to re-do it a million times.
So I stamping them once- then stamped over that a second time to get a better opacity. Next, I stamped the little images from the Kawaii emoji plate over it in white and finished it off with a nice thick layer of topcoat. When it was dry, it was really easy to peel that up and place it perfectly on my nails.

St. Patrick's Day Nails ft. Bundle Monster Holiday

Hello Readers!



Happy St. Patrick's Day to all who celebrate it! Today's post is, of course, inspired by the holiday over here in America and is also my fill for the #clairestelle8challenge on instagram.

I decided to break out my classic Bundle Monster holiday plates and use the St. Patrick's Day images on them for this mani. Although I have other plates that have shamrocks on them, I haven't actually used these plates yet and the images on them are pretty cute.

I used the Sinful Colors St. Patrick's Day color "Works Like a Charm" for my base on my pointer/pinky fingers, and decided to stamp over that with the Essie "Off Tropic" polish, because it is a deeply saturated green and all those dark polishes normally work great for stamping. Just be aware when using regular polish to stamp that it will normally show up a few shades lighter with stamping than with regular polishing. Actually, I often find the same to be true with actual stamping polishes, to a lesser extent.

The original Bundle Monster holiday collection, with the old school round plates, has two St. Patrick's Day plates, and I used both here. From the above plate, I only used the shamrock image on the right hand side. 

But on this plate, I made a decal with the coin image and use the top shamrock image. I just took advantage of the straight line at the top of the image and stamped it about 1/3 from the top of my nails.

Next, I used this MoYou London plate from the Frenchy collection to create the bands at the top of the pattern. I used the skinniest band at the very top to do this. I find that to place these bands correctly, you have to be very careful when lifting the stamper. I like to hold it to my nail for a few seconds to give it a chance to dry on my nail before lifting, and when I lift I do it very slowly, checking to make sure the band hasn't come up over the nail and folded over.

Finally, I finished off my pointer/pinky fingers with a little square stud, because we know any St. Patrick's Day look benefits from a little bit of Leprechaun treasure!


Will you be celebrating St. Patrick's Day this year?   Personally, I think the only festive part of my day will be my fingernails, but we did have a green pudding pie earlier this week in a kind of pi day/St. Patrick's day combo celebration. The kids have been making St. Patrick's Day crafts at the library and doing other small activities throughout the week. But I'm not really planning on doing anything elaborate this year.

26 Great Nail Art Ideas: Red and Pink

Hello Readers!

Today's post for 26 Great Nail Art Ideas is based around colors: red and pink. Although it's not quite February yet, red and pink together made me get stuck on Valentine's Day themes so I went with it.

I also decided to try a little bit of assisted freehand because it's been a while since I've done any kind of freehand on my nails. This is another mani that uses a few plates, but let's get into the polish first:

So pretty simple here. The OPI "Red My Fortune Cookie" goes on a bit sheer at first; it's a sort of jelly formula, but at two coats it was enough for me and super shiny!