I have a sort of weird admission to make. Every year, I find myself wanting to do some cannabis themed nails for 420, but until this year I never thought far enough ahead to get what I need to actually do a mani. I am not a hand painter when it comes to nail art, but particularly not when I'm doing something that isn't sort of... easy and straightforward, so there was no way I was going to try to hand paint pot leaves. This year, though, I made sure to get my hands on a stamping plate with a pot leaf image - and then it seemed like everywhere I looked were various weed themed stamping plates. My life. Anyway, I had this exact mani in mind from jump and even though I considered doing something else along the way it did end up literally exactly as planned. 

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I did consider a neon watermarble as the base for this mani, but in the end I just decided that I wanted a super bold neon green base and Cirque Colors' Sour Punch is basically the perfect one for this mani. This polish is described as a neon lime green jelly packed with dazzling iridescent flakes and... yep! Exactly. I really, really love Cirque Colors polishes and some of my favorites are their flakie jellies. There's just something really juicy and fun about them and this one just absolutely screamed 420 nails to me. 

For this mani, I applied two coats of Sour Punch to all of my nails. I don't actually have full opacity on the nails with this mani and I could definitely see some nail line in person. I really, really like the sort of see through look and I think that this really bold stamping did help to camouflage the nail line, but you could also do three coats and get to an opaque base. 

As I said above, I absolutely bought this stamping plate with this specific mani in mind so there wasn't really a lot of thought beyond that when I was putting this design together. I knew that I wanted to go with black to get a really high contrast with that neon base, so I grabbed for my ride or die favorite black stamping polish. I also knew that I definitely wanted to alternate the direction of my placement (as usual...) to get a little bit more dimension. I think that was even more important with this stamping image because it's so bold and the images are so large that it would have been very obviously same-y if I had placed them all in the same direction.

Once I was happy with my stamping, I sealed it in with a nail art top coat and then followed with a quick dry glossy top coat for shine and volume. And voila!

Whether you participate in 420 activities or not - I do, for the record, live in Canada where it is legal - I think it's fun to play with this particular theme for nail art. I will admit I'm actually kind of excited to see what other artists do with this particular theme this year. There really, really are some super cool stamping plates out there with the weed theme, so I suspect there'll be some cool ones. 

Be sure to head over to @pblnails on Instagram for video tutorials for all of my nail art designs!

Thanks for reading!