When doing a marathon of 24 nail art designs in one theme, I will fully admit that there can be some creative fatigue that comes with it. When that happens, I generally have two options. The first is to push through and just try things until something sticks. Unfortunately, this is a really frustrating option and sees failure much more often than it sees success. The second option is to try something that feels sort of outside of the theme. This is how you end up with pastels at Halloween, I'd say, and in the entirely opposite direction - vampy Christmas nails, which is what I have for you today!

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Dead But Delicious by Painted Polish was their October (I believe) PPU offering and I knew I was going to buy it even before I saw what it looked like just based on the name and the What We Do In The Shadows inspiration. The fact that it's an absolutely stunning polish certainly didn't hurt. This polish is describe as "a vampy blood red jelly base with red to magenta to violet shifting iridescent flakes and metallic flakes" and it's just... I mean, it's basically the vampire inspiration in a bottle. Of course, I really didn't think I was going to get the chance to use it until after the new year, since I was so focused on Christmas. Enter my creative block and BOOM - vampy! Honestly, I didn't know if it was going to work, but I definitely felt inspired when it came to me.

For this mani, I applied two coats of Dead But Delicious to all of my nails and let it dry down before moving on to my stamping. 

Admittedly, figuring out what I was going to stamp over this was a bit of a struggle. Of course, in the end I had to go with snowflakes - my personal favorite non-denominational holiday design component - and I decided to go with these really sort of modern, graphic images from the Pict You PY-J052 Stamping Plate in rose gold stamping polish. The images I went for were ones that featured a pairing of solid, graphic shapes with snowflakes components. It was actually a little bit tricky to choose, but in the end I used four different images that felt like they brought a really cohesive look to the nails. I repeated the same design on both my pinkie and first fingers as well as my ring and thumb nails, changing the direction of my placement on each so that each nail was still different.

Once I was happy with the overall design, I applied a nail art top coat to seal it all in before following with a matte top coat to take down the shine and leave a sort of velvety look to further drive home the vampiness. And voila!

I wasn't really sure how I was going to feel about this as I was doing it because leaning into vampiness at the holidays seems kind of strange, but I actually love how it turned out and I feel like it would look gorgeous with a really rich jewel toned holiday outfit. Also, I must say, some of the cuter designs aren't necessarily to my personal taste, as much as I love to do them and play with them, and this definitely feels like something I would wear outside of play. If that makes sense.

Also, have I mentioned my love for Painted Polish recently? LOVE her polishes, wish she still had a Canadian stockist. Whimper.

Don't forget to check back here on the blog every day in December leading up to Christmas Eve for more holiday/winter themed nail art designs and be sure to head over to @pblnails and follow for video tutorials of all of the designs I post here on the blog!

Thanks for reading!