MERRY CHRISTMAS, EVERYONE! For my last holiday themed nail art design, I decided to go all in with a festive Christmas-y color palette and some really pretty ornament stamping with a bit of sparkle. I'm so thrilled with how this marathon of holiday and winter themed nail art has gone and I'm really happy to end it here with this mani. For those of you who have been here with me every step of the way, thank you so much and I hope you have or have had a wonderful holiday season, whatever you celebrate or don't. 

Without further ado, let's get to these nails!

One thing that I always find myself being mindful of when it comes to putting together Christmas/Holiday themed nail art is that I can't lean entirely on the color palette that we think of as traditionally seasonal. I mean, I love a red and green or icy blue mani as much as the next one, but I feel like great holiday nail art can also come in more non-traditional colors - especially if those colors have a distinctly cozy vibe to them. For today's mani, I leaned into taupe paired with black, white and champagne gold and I think it definitely brings the holiday vibe without being too on the nose. 

Keep reading for more!

Some of my favorite nail art designs for the holidays are the ones that don't actually specifically reference any of the solstice adjacent holidays and instead lean all the way in to the winteriness of it all. For today's mani, I decided to take inspiration from a mani that I did a couple of years ago with this really frosty blue gradient and swirling snowflake stamping, but add a little something more for 2022 with some more stamping. I mean... by this point I have embraced my love for the kitchen sink, so no one will be surprised when I decide more is more. 

Keep reading for... more!

So I had this idea for a holiday mani that would feature sort of... deconstructed Christmas trees using stamping. I actually tried a few different versions of this idea, but it wasn't until I decided to try out using some dots stamping images that I feel fairly confident were not necessarily intended for this particular use that it came together. It's probably the most sort of... non-traditionally holiday design I've done this month, but I think there's just something so cool about how this came together!

Keep reading for more!

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. 

Keep reading for more!

As we head into this final week of holiday themed nails for 2022, I wanted to keep it Merry & Bright, as it were, with some layered stamping and one of my absolutely favorite polishes for the holiday season. If I'm being completely honest, I will likely not be wearing any of the designs I post here on the blog over Christmas, but I am very likely to have the polish I used for the base of this mani on my nails, so I'm super excited to have it featured in today's mani. 

Keep reading for more!

One of my absolute favorite things in the winter is when the snow comes heavy and wet and ends up sticking around on the trees like a twinkly blanket. It's just one of the prettiest things in the world in my opinion - probably stemming from just how excited I got when I was a kid and that first stick around snow came because it meant ski season would be coming, now that I think about it. Anyway, this is definitely more of a general wintery vibe mani but I am definitely dreaming of a white, cozy Christmas.

Keep reading for more!

When it comes to my holiday nail art posting schedule, I do like to throw in some less Christmas specific nails and go in the direction of just being wintery. That can obviously come in the form of snowflakes, which get a lot of love from me at this time of year, but it can also come in the form of a fun holiday landscape. Last year I did a green layered forest design that was actually inspired by some holiday packaging, so this year I wanted to change it up a little and go with a different color palette, stamping plate, and I think just overall vibe. It's interesting, I think, how two things that are really similar can actually also be entirely different. 

Keep reading for more!

One of my favorite styles of holiday nail art is sweater nails. Obviously there's a million different ways to do sweater nails - and I honestly sort of feel like I've tried most of them at this point - but in my opinion a simple, straightforward sweater design is always a classic and a sort of can't-go-wrong type of design for this time of year. Though I resisted picking up the new Uberchic Ultimate DIY Sweater Palette (which I will undoubtedly stop resisting and pick up soon, if we're being honest) I did pick up some other Uberchic plates for this holiday season and was super excited to use one of those images for this mani!

Keep reading for more!

The last couple of years, I've really had fun doing mani's with cute little Christmas-y characters on them, so of course this year I was going to lean into the same thing. I was actually super excited about this particular mani as soon as I had the Uberchic It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas plate in my hands because this set of characters is just so adorable and works so well together for a really simple but cohesive design - at least I think so!

Keep reading for more!

 THIS POST IS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PUEEN COSMETICS.

I knew that for this holiday season I would be figuring out a way to use this single image from the Pueen 115 Stamping Plate to create a whole mani and I knew that it wouldn't just be using the full cover image on all of my fingers. Of course, I wasn't entirely sure about anything else beyond that, but I rolled with it anyway. I tend to like to challenge myself and I also tend to feel like I need to bring something creative in hopes of maybe offering some creative inspiration on different ways to use full cover stamping images. 

Keep reading for more!

Every holiday season when I'm putting together my Christmas nail art designs, I always like to deviate a little from the traditional color palette we tend to associate with this time of year, and I always find that you can pretty easily make purple work for something wintery. I actually had some version of this mani in my head for weeks before I sat down to it... and then I promptly failed on what I initially had in mind and had to recalibrate, but I'm so glad that I did because I love how this one turned out!

Keep reading for more!

Obviously gnome nails are very, very much having a moment right now. I mean, based on what I'm seeing in stores right now, I would go so far as to say that it's gnometastic out there this holiday season and everywhere you look - GONKS! I will admit that I really, really wanted to do some last holiday season but I didn't have a stamping plate with gnome images and my hand painting skills are... mid at best. So, of course, for this year's holiday season I made sure I had acquired some stamping plates featuring gnome images and I knew I would be doing at least one. 

Keep reading for more!

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. 

Keep reading for more!

One of my favorite nail art designs from back in 2018 when I was still pretty new to nail art was this adorable little penguin design that I did and I've sort of had it in the back of my head to recreate something similar ever since. Now, four years to the day later, I decided that it was time, except instead of a penguin I was going to go with a snowman and I was going to level up the design a little bit with some other details that speak to experience. Honestly, I feel really proud when I look at how far I've come in the past 4 years when it comes to skill and creativity, and I love revisiting those old designs through these new eyes.

Keep reading for more!

A couple of years ago, I put together this mani and it immediately became and has continued to be one of my favorite nail art designs that I've ever done and the design of it is actually one that I've used for a bunch of different occasions since then. Of course, since it's still my favorite I feel inclined to do some version of it every year - though I do try to be sure that I change it up at least a little. This year, I decided to go for a red tip to give a very distinctly Christmasiness to it and I'm pretty in love (and also a little bit devastated, but we'll get into that in a minute...)

Keep reading for more!

From back when I was very first getting into nail art, I've loved designs featuring Christmas lights and I always try to put together at least one mani featuring them each this. This year I used my all time favorite Christmas lights stamping image from the Uberchic Holiday Spirit Stamping plate. It's a really simple image, just one straight line of string lights with a loop towards the center, but it's absolutely amazing how versatile this particular image has been for me. This year, I decided to sort of merge the inspiration of a few different string lights designs I've done in previous years with a little bit of the text stamping that I've fallen so in love with this year. 

Keep reading for more!

 THIS POST IS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PUEEN COSMETICS.

Clearly I am a big fan of the blobby abstract mani, right? Like I really don't think I've been subtle about that - it's just such a versatile technique that works for any occasion, including Christmas apparently. For today's design, I knew I wanted to use the Pueen Accent Fun 01 Stamping Plate to put together n abstract botanical design and I decided it would be really fun to do it using some classic Christmas colors, some blobs, and a little bit of dots just for good measure.

Keep reading for more!

I really feel like very few people would disagree if I said that there are basically 5 holiday season colors - Red, Green, Gold, Blue and White. Obviously there are other solstice adjacent holidays other than Christmas and Hanukkah but I think those tend to be the ones the sort of drive the story here in North America and as a result drive the colors that we associate with the season. Anyway, all of this is to say that I just absolutely love a really bold, festive, sparkly blue at this time of year so for this one I decided to pull out one of my long time favorite blue polishes to use during the holidays and put together this simple but quite impactful snowflake mani that's perfect for the season regardless of what you do or don't celebrate.

Keep reading for more!

With pop art nail designs having such a moment right now, I had an inkling that I wanted to put together some Christmasy ones this month, but it wasn't until I had the Uberchic Beauty Merry & Bright Stamping Plate in hand and saw these images that just felt like the absolute perfect choice for this mani that I decided officially to do it. Since most of the pop art mani's I've seen thus far have been done in gel polish, I wasn't entirely sure how this technique would turn out using regular polish, but I was in for the experiment and I only had to do it twice to get it right. 

Keep reading for more!