I feel like the default for holiday nail art tends to go one of two ways. The first is the obvious, on the nose designs that feature traditional Christmas colors and imagery, and the other is what I did with this mani which is just a very, very generally wintery sort of vibe. Honestly, I actually tend to lean more into a general winter vibe than I have this year, but on top of being a break from traditional Christmasiness, today's mani is also a bit of a palette cleanse with a simple, straight forward, almost-minimalist-if-your-measure-is-by-the-usual-level-of-kitchen-sink sort of mani. 

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I actually very, very recently picked up ILNP's Shaved Ice, which is a white crelly polish with blue and green flakes through it giving a very wintery, icy sort of vibe. I'm a huge fan of these types of speckled white crelly polishes as nail art bases because they provide a great canvas without the starkness of a white créme and I'm building up a bit of a collection of them. Of course, I really wanted to use this polish in this year's Christmas nails, so this felt like it might be my last chance.

To start, I applied two coats of Shaved Ice to all of my nails and let those dry down.

The stamping for this design is actually about as simple as it gets for me outside of just applying a single full cover image to all of my nails. For this mani, I chose two images - one a single snowflake and the other a sort of garland of snowflakes - along with stamping polishes in white and teal to really meld perfectly with the base polish. On each nail, I first applied the single snowflake in white towards one corner of the nail, alternating between applying towards the base and tip. Next, I went in with the teal polish and the garland image and used that to fill in the opposite side of the nail, shifting around the angle I applied the image at. Like I said, really simple design on this one.

Once I was happy with my stamping, I sealed everything in with a nail art top coat and then finished with a generous layer of glossy top coat for shine and volume. And voila!

I sincerely don't know what it is about this combination of the white crelly and this teal stamping polish, but there's something about it that just screams wintery and cozy to me and I really can't even explain it. Like it makes me wanna put on cozy PJs and curl up under my blankies for a long winter's nap. Festive!