The more I think about it, the more I really realize that the holiday season basically has only two moods for me. Well, I guess that's not entirely true, but I would rather not focus on the stressful mood and instead focus on the good ones. The two dominant holiday season moods for me are festive, obviously, and cozy, which is my personal favorite. Curled up with the Christmas tree lit up, a hot egg nog chai, and a fun Christmas movie on the TV - like Die Hard, fight me! - is my favorite place to be at this time of year. All of that to say that today's mani is inspired by being curled up by the fire, cozy in a Christmas sweater, surrounded by holiday vibes. 

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I recently picked up four of these flakie nail polishes from KADS, which I actually didn't have the highest hopes for based on their price point, and they ended up impressing me a ton. The day after first trying out these polishes, I did go online and order the other two in the collection because I like them that much. This shade, Slate Cake, has this deep grey base that gives the vibe of like... a faded black t-shirt, and then it's packed with really warm toned multichrome flakies. It's just... so much more expensive looking than what I paid, if we're being honest, and I'm really impressed.

For this mani, I applied three thin coats of Slate Cake to all of my nails as my base and let them dry down completely before I moved onto my stamping. 

I knew that I wanted to pair that rich, smoky base - which to me very much has fireplace sort of vibes with the deep smoky grey paired with those really fiery flakies - with a cozy cable knit stamping image. I really like doing cable knit nails at this time of year, they're just so undeniably cozy in vibe. I used a black stamping polish to apply the cable knit image to all of my nails with the placement in the same direction. Next, I decided to add some high contrast snowflake images along with a single reindeer in white to really drive home the holiday theme, which definitely could easily be lost in just a cable knit design. 

Once I was happy with my stamping, I sealed the design in with a nail art top coat before following with a fairly voluminous glossy top coat for shine. And voila!

I'm so in love with how this turned out, I must say. There's something about this base polish that just feels absolutely cozy to me and then the pairing of the cable knit stamping with the snowy, wintery white accents just makes me feel very much in the holiday spirit. I really do think that both this base polish along with the Nicole Diary L13 Stamping Plate that I used for this design are just absolute, full on must have's for any collection. You know, if you're into this kind of thing.

Be sure to keep checking back here to the blog as well as to @pblnails on Instagram for more holiday themed nail art designs every day in December up until Christmas Eve!

Thanks for reading!!