Whew!! Doing 31 days straight of nail art is no joke, you guys, and when I finished all of those Halloween mani's I was pretty much completely sapped. I actually did finish them a little bit early and I took a little bit of time to rest my poor nails and also to try and get a little bit of inspiration back since that took so much out of me. That said, I do think I need to keep it simple and soft for a bit here so I suspect that a good chunk of this month is going to be straightforward nails as my mind gets ready for Christmas!

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Like I said, I needed a bit of a breather after all of those Halloween nails, so I wanted my first post-Halloween mani to be really soft, so I went with a sheer base and paired it with really soft pastel shades for this minimal design. First, I applied two coats of a beige toned sheer nude polish to all of my nails and let that dry down. I love a nude sheer because it can help camoflage and give you a really flawless base while still feeling kind of naked. 

Next, I grabbed four pastel shades from the Sally Hansen Insta-Dri range, one of my drugstore favorites, and used a nail art brush to apply this sort of randomly placed angular shapes to the nails. I wanted sharp lines - as sharp as I could get hand painting them, anyway - so I used the fine liner brush to apply the outline and also fill in a bit at the point and then I went in with the brush from the nail polish bottle to build in the rest of the shape. 

For the stamping, I knew that I wanted to go with a sort of botanical vibe, but I also wanted some texture to those shapes at the tips. First, I went in with this sort of speckled image in a white stamping polish, which was actually really easy to do since I had that corner I could sort of place the rectangular image perfectly up against. Next, I went in with two different botanical images and I decided to use deeper versions of the two pastels on those tips to apply the image. For the middle finger, I went with a more muted deeper green and for my ring finger a sort of berry shade.

Once I was happy with my stamping, I sealed it in with a nail art top coat and then finished with a layer of matte top coat to bring down the shine and further mute out the overall design. And voila!

Honestly, this mani feels like such a delicate breath of fresh air after going so hard with Halloween for so long. Don't get me wrong, I had SO MUCH fun with Halloween nails this year, but it's definitely nice to take a deep breath and go a little softer in the wake of it. Also, I really love what you can do when you play with different types of modified French mani's - the possibilities are endless.

Thanks so much for reading!