I did a lot of planning for this year's Christmas nails, but today's mani wasn't at all planned. I actually saw an absolutely adorable mani from @lindseysbeautylounge1 on Instagram and immediately wanted to put together my own version of it. There was just something about those tiny images right at the tip that just completely pulled me in and I knew that with the help of a couple of Clear Jelly Stamper plates, I could definitely put together a version that referenced the inspiration mani but felt like me. And I literally had this on my nails within hours of seeing it in my Reels feed.

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I told myself I wasn't going to lean as heavily on snowflakes with this year's holiday nails and yet I can't seem to help myself. I just LOVE snowflake nails. Today's mani is another recreation from holiday season's past, one that I've actually wanted to recreate for the past couple of years but hadn't gotten around to. This year, I changed up the color story pretty significantly using a stunning reflective glitter polish from Whats Up Nails as my base and I am OBSESSED. There's a spot in my house that has the best light for making polish pop and I spent more time standing under that light admiring this mani than I might like to admit.

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One of my personal Must Do holiday mani's has always been a nordic star sweater design. I'm not even sure how many years in a row I've done this style of design, but it has definitely been several. In my humble opinion, a nordic star design is peak Christmas sweater - and very often not even ugly. For this mani, I pulled out one of my all time favorite nail polishes, which I am now using as sparingly as possible as I'm pretty sure it has been discontinued, and paired it with a couple of different nordic star images to create a new version of this design. And, of course, I'm in love!

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 THIS POST IS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PUEEN COSMETICS. 

When I sat down to do today's mani, I was in the mood for high contrast. I wanted a rich, deep, blackened base polish paired with crisp, bright white stamping in a really unfussy design. Now, admittedly, I suspect there are probably a lot of people whose definition of unfussy differs from mine, since I've become a bit of a maximalist when it comes to nail art, but for me this is definitely an unfussy design. 

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I can not even tell you how excited I was to get today's mani on my nails, I sincerely can't. As soon as I received the CjS-324 Stamping Plate, which was included in a Mystery Box, I was beyond excited to put together some version of this design. I initially planned on going with a more traditional red, green and white color story, but in the end I was in the mood for something a little more cozy. One of my favorite cozy color combos - not just for my nails - is pink and grey and I think it worked perfectly with this design. 

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In December of 2020, I put together what has become one of my favorite nail art designs I've ever done. It's one that has sparked countless different versions for various holidays and themes and it's one that I've brought back a different version of every Christmas since. While I did consider it, I couldn't go and break tradition this year, so I decided to make this year's version green and not overthink it. It's just such a classic at this point - it had to be done!

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While I do a LOT of planning for holiday nail art, this mani actually sort of came out of nowhere when my Clear Jelly Stamper Black Friday order arrived just when I was about to do some nails. As I was looking at the CJS-LC-100 Stamping Plate, the idea for this design just came together and I had to get it onto my nails. I am definitely still getting the hang of layered stamping (and am very much a perfectionist when it comes to trying to get it right) but I'm really, really loving playing with layered designs.

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Did I desperately want to do one of those adorably gnome designs that you see from professional nail tech's last year? Absolutely I did. Did I try and fail miserably at hand painting them? 100%. So this year, when I saw the Clear Jelly Stamper CjS-LC-100 Stamping Plate, which also featured some really gorgeous plaid stamping images, I just had to have it. HAD TO HAVE IT. Initially, I had planned on doing this mani in red, but in the end I decided to go with blue and let the gnome shine. 

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 THIS POST IS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PUEEN COSMETICS.  

One thing that I'm trying to teach myself as I finally sort of settle into nail art - until this point, I've still felt very much like I'm still learning, but I'm settling more into a confidence that I know what I'm doing - is to lean into the simplicity sometimes. While my tendency is to throw the kitchen sink at my nails, I'm finding myself more and more drawn to much simpler designs. Of course, simplicity and Christmas don't exactly tend to go together, so I'm having to focus a little more and resist the urge to DO more, which is what I did with today's mani. 

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I've actually had today's mani in mind for a few years now - or some version of it, anyway - but it wasn't until this year that I had the perfect stamping plate to get the job done. As I've mentioned, I've been getting more into layered stamping recently and I've added several Clear Jelly Stamper plates to my collection. As soon as I saw the holly and berries design on the CjS-C33 plate, I knew that I was finally going to get to do this mani and I really, really love the way it turned out!

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Every year at Christmas, I try to put together some mani's that aren't in traditional holiday colors - red, green, white, gold, blue, silver, that is - but I'm beginning to find myself thinking that shades of lavender are also becoming a little bit festive in my head. I wouldn't say that this mani is particularly festive, but I do think it's a really fun wintery holiday mani and I'm kind of in love with it. It also utilized layered stamping, which I've always been super intimidated by, and I'm kind of wildly in love with how that aspect of the design turned out. 

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When it comes to Christmasy nails, I feel like it's really easy to go all in with your traditional Christmas designs and colors, but I always like to also do some more modern designs as well. Today's mani was actually inspired by a set of nail wraps I saw listed somewhere online. I apologise - I can't remember the site. In the end, I decided to go with a speckled green base rather than the nude base that the inspiration design had, and I personally think it makes for a beautiful, very modern take on Christmas nails. 

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When Melody Susie reached out to me to ask if I wanted to try out their gel polishes and put together a mani, I immediately knew that I wanted to put together some Christmas nails. I will admit that they did challenge me a bit with by asking me to use their nail art brushes to create a hand painted mani, but I was up for the challenge and I'm so, so glad that I went for it because I absolutely love how this design turned out and I feel pretty proud of myself for doing it entirely by hand. 

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It is my firmly held opinion that every holiday season needs a plaid mani. There's just something about plaid that just works so beautifully at this time of year. Interestingly, I used to do a lot more plaid designs that I do these days (should probably invest in some new plaid plates, actually...) but there's no resisting the pull towards plaid when the holidays come around. I went for a very similar design to something I did last year, but I changed up the color story and some of the details and I'm pretty much obsessed. 

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 THIS POST IS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PUEEN COSMETICS.

When I started plotting out my ideas for this year's marathon of Christmas nail art, a lot of the designs I was drawn to were the more abstract designs that have become so popular in the last couple of years. As much as I love the more on-the-nose Christmas designs, I think there's definitely something to be said for a more blobby abstract design at this time of year as well. For this mani, I decided to grab for the Pueen Accent Fun 01 Stamping Plate a really bold holiday color palette!

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Do they still make those holiday commercials with the Coke bears? I sort of hope they do, if only because there's such a specific holiday nostalgia attached to them. They are definitely what inspired today's mani, even if there is no cola product placement in this particular design. While this design could certainly be considered more winter themed than specifically holiday themed, I did add a touch of red and green and I do think that there's something Christmasy about polar bears, so I'm saying it's definitely a holiday mani!

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Today's mani is another recreation of one of my personal favorite designs that I did last year - but this time around I went with a much more traditionally Christmas color story and I think it might have turned out even better than the first time. Even though I tend to convince myself that reverse stamping is going to be complicated and take a lot time, it almost never does. That said, this mani also utilized some layered stamping, which I'm still getting the hang of if I'm being honest, and that really does make the whole process go a lot more smoothly.

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Sometimes I will have a polish in my collection for quite a while before I get around to using it. There can be a lot of reasons for this, but oftentimes I'm just waiting for the perfect opportunity to you it. Months ago now, the people over at Born Pretty sent me this absolutely beautiful reflective holo glitter gel polish that I fell pretty in love with almost immediately, but I kept struggling to figure out how I wanted to use it until I had the lightbulb for this particular mani. It's very, very simple, but I think that's what makes it shine. 

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Sometimes when I look back through nail art designs that I've done before, I just want desperately to recreate those designs. So for this mani, I went back a couple of years in my own nail art to recreate this design that I put together back in 2021. To be honest, I kept it very much the same as the first time and all I really changed was the color story, which I think is distinctly different and yet no less cozy and features one of my new favorite polishes in my collection. 

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