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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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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I am definitely someone who tends to revisit design styles that I've done before, though I do try to change things up at least a bit rather than just straight up recreating designs I've done in the past. One design that has become a sort of staple for me is the one I used for today's mani and it's one that I feel like I've done countless versions of over the past few years since the first time I did it. For today's mani I will admit that the changes are somewhat minimal, but I still absolutely love this mani!

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When I start planning for Halloween nails, I will admit that I spend a lot of time on Pinterest looking for inspiration. While I generally prefer to be inspired to create my own work through others, as soon as I saw this mani I knew I wanted to recreate my own version of it. I just fell completely in love with the composition of it and knew that I could put together my own version using stamping rather than hand painting that I would love - and I think it turned out pretty great. 

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When I sat down to do today's nails, I pretty much knew exactly what I wanted to do with my stamping, but I wasn't entirely sure what to do for the base. I will admit that this is a problem pretty often and I think it can really make or break a design overall. In the end, I decided to go with what I tend to think of as a sort of signature mani for me with a sheer flakie pond base and holo gradient tip. For me, this really is one of the most versatile bases in my arsenal and is also deceptively easy to do - which I LOVE about it. 

So without further ado, let's get to the nails!

Two years ago I did one of my all time favorite nail designs, inspired by the incredibly beautiful coats that were on display at Joe Biden's Inauguration. I mean, honestly, every skittle mani I've done since that one has been measured against it even though it was, by far, one of the simplest nail art designs I've ever posted here on the blog. I definitely had that one in mind when I was putting together this mani, keeping in mind the richly pigmented shades that I used and the contrast of the black graphic design. This mani is definitely its own thing, but the inspiration definitely did come from that time we were all in love with the coats.

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 THIS POST IS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PUEEN COSMETICS.

I have to admit, this is one of those mani's that just sort of happened on the fly. I didn't actually go in with a plan, I just sat down at my nail desk and randomly picked a stamping image and sort of went from there, making decisions on the final look as I went, and I'm honestly... sort of madly in love with what came out of it. It's actually a really, really simple design that I think would be perfect for stamping beginners, but it also has enough interest and impact that it gets me excited as well. 

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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. 

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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!

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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.

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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.

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I have to be totally honest. After my Purple Holo Tip Gradient Spiderweb Nails, I really did think that I would leave this particular technique to the side for this spooky season, but I just couldn't resist doing a slightly different and more colorful version. I mean, really, I think I would have pretty easily been able to create at least a handful of distinctly different versions of this mani for Halloween with ease, but I definitely wanted to change it up somewhat. Maybe. I don't know. I'm pretty in love with how this one turned out though!

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I love a signature. Whether it's a signature scent or a signature style or whatever, I feel like there's just something about really digging into something that's just yours that's so cool. Two years ago at Christmas, I came up with an idea that has become a sort of signature mani of mine and it's one that I tend to try and pull out some version of for a lot of different occasions/themes. For this Halloween, I had actually intended to change it up only slightly, but in the end I actually feel like I changed it up quite a bit and I am.. fairly madly in love with the end result, if we're being honest. 

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As a girl child of the 80s, I obviously have a ton of nostalgia for Lisa Frank. Back when I was little, the binders and stickers and notebooks and pencils and all of the other goodies that were available in bright neon designs with dolphins and unicorns and kittens and pandas all over them we basically better than gold and I was in love. Obviously I've grown out of that particular phase in my life, but there's something about summer nails that just makes me want to lean into all of that nostalgia and go hard. Being that I'm also currently deep in a rabbit hole of gradients, it seemed like the perfect time.

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I swear, it happens every year - I fall back in love with gradients in the springtime. Now, this may be because I like the look of pastel or muted gradients better than the more saturated shades that I tend to reach for the rest of the year. Actually, now that I think about it, that's almost certainly why I tend to do so many gradients in the springtime. Anyway, I always forget how much I love doing them and how quick and easy they really are when you're using the right products and have the technique down, but now that I'm back into the swing you can expect some more gradients popping up here on the blog in coming weeks!

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If you follow the blog, you'll know by now that I've really been struggling with inspiration these past couple of months and it's been a persistent and pretty annoying thing for me since I try to put together 3 nail art designs per week to post here on the blog and on my social media. Luckily, last night I had a bit of a lightbulb moment and decided that for the month of March I'm going to lean into favorites. Favorite colors, favorite techniques, and most importantly favorite stamping images. I tend to try not to use the same images multiple times just because I like to try and make all of my mani's unique, but there are so many images that I just love and that I know I could happily use over and over again for a lot of different overall mani designs - so that's what I'm going to do!

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I'm really having a whole moment of layered stamping at the moment, I must say. And not necessarily in the way that a lot of people think of layered stamping, with images that are intended to be layered to create a specific design. I'm much more interested in sort of creating my own design and filling my nails with a bunch of different images and I've found that I've had really good luck with stamping plates from KADS, which tend to have a lot of smaller images that you can use to create different designs. For today's mani, I used one of those KADS Stamping Plates along with a few of their stamping polishes and I'm kind of obsessed with how it turned out. 

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Ever since I started doing Christmas nail art, back when I was just getting into nails and really had no idea what I was doing, I've loved sweater nails and I've done at least one or two versions of them every single year. This year, I will admit that the two I've done are a little bit more samey than I maybe intended, but I've found my favorite Fair Isle sweater style stamping image and nothing compares so it's the one I reach for. For today's mani, I changed it up a little bit from the Monochrome Green Fair Isle Sweater Nails from a couple of weeks ago, and I love love love how it turned out. 

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