For pretty much as long as I've been doing Christmas nail art, I've wanted to put together a Grinch mani. Every year there's a short list of Christmas movies that I always make sure to curl up and watch and the Jim Carrey version of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas is definitely on that list, so I have a soft spot for the Grinchiness of it all. This year I thought ahead and ordered myself a Dr. Seuss themed stamping plate so that I would have what I needed to put together this design and I decided to keep it really simple with bold, bright colors and straightforward stamping. As a resident of the kitchen sink squad, I will go ahead and applaud my own restraint on this one. 

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When it came to the color story here, I knew two very specific things going into this. The first thing was that I needed to choose just the right colors for the Grinch and the second was that this almost certainly needed to feature a white base. Now, as a longtime white base hater, I will say that this is not your traditional white base. While I would say that this is still a créme formula, the addition of the white shimmers in the formula makes Dimension Nails' Arctic Wolf** makes this particular white polish my favorite straight up opaque white polish. Honestly, this is a really easy to work with, super pigmented but not gloopy white polish that I love.

So to start, I applied two coats of Arctic Wolf to all of my nails as my base. 

Now, for the reverse stamping I was also really particular about the polishes that I chose. For the Grinch, I found the perfect green in Dimension Nails' Malachite Butterfly. Like seriously, it's the Grinchiest green polish I've ever seen. I wanted to keep the rest of the colors feeling very... sort of kindergarten rainbow, if that makes sense. Bright and bold and primary. I used a really small dotting tool to fill in the Grinch as well as the string lights and I tried pretty hard not to be too precious about staying in the lines on the lights - they are shining, after all, or at least that's what I told my brain when it started to get too fussy. 

Now, because I didn't want to tint that bright white base at all, I decided to apply my reverse stamping images while the base was still tacky rather than apply my usual sticky base coat, which isn't quite as invisible over a white base as I might like it to be. This actually went much more smoothly than I was expecting and there were only a couple of spots in the string lights where it didn't quite adhere perfectly. Again, trying to dial back the perfectionism.

Once I was happy with the overall design, I sealed everything in with a nail art top coat and then followed with a glossy top coat for shine and volume. And voila!

Admittedly, I initially wasn't entirely sure about this one because I felt like it might be a little bit too sparse in areas, but I've actually really grown to love how this turned out. I think the colors really do a good job of referencing the original book with that warm red, Grinchy green, and other very childlike colors. It's just... so classically Christmasy!

If you're interested in seeing a tutorial for this design - or any of the other holiday designs I've put together, head over to @pblnails on Instagram and follow me there to keep up on all of my nail art designs!

Thanks for reading!