Today's mani is another one of those examples of times when I sit down to do my nails with one idea in my head, but the mani I end up with is completely different in the end. This is another mani based on the prompts for the Whats Up Nails March Nail Art Challenge and this prompt was Fluid Art (Spots & Geode). It actually hadn't occurred to me to do a dry marble until I saw the inspiration pictures featuring some STUNNING nails from Sveta Sanders and that's what really, really sparked my inspiration for this mani. 

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I have to admit that today's mani isn't necessarily Me, but it's so adorable that I can't help but love it. Quite recently, I picked up a few new plates from Beauty Big Bang and one of them was this Hello Kitty themed plate that I just couldn't resist. I've been doing more reverse stamping lately and I just, for some reason, couldn't wait to get these images onto my nails. 

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Clearly, I couldn't let a little mini marathon of Valentine's Day nail art pass without throwing in an abstract mani with some cute stamping... I mean, I feel a little bit like this style of mani is becoming a signature for me. The thing that always makes me go back to this type of mani is that it's entirely versatile - I can really make it work for any season, theme, or vibe to be exactly what I want it to be, and so it makes total sense that I was able to make... basically the exact same mani work for Christmas as for Valentine's Day.

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Sometimes when I sit down to do my nails, I have a fully formed idea of exactly what I'm going to do... and then when I'm finished it absolutely is not that. That's definitely what happened with this mani. I had one plan and it wasn't even nebulous - I knew exactly what I was going to do. I pulled out everything I needed for that mani... and then proceeded to use all of those products to do something else. It happens, right? I'm excited about it though because I really don't do gradient stamping enough and I think it really worked for this mani. 

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Hey guys! This week has gotten away from me a little bit and I ended up missing my planned upload yesterday - but these things happen and I'm going to make sure that I still get the same number of mani's that I had originally planned for Valentine's Day - there just might be a bit of a double up tomorrow. Anyway, for today's Valentine's Day themed nail art, I decided to keep it simple and went with a pairing of red and white with some graphic details and a little bit of cuteness. 

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I feel like it's about once a year that I get the idea in my head to do some leopard print nails. They always seem to be a pretty big hit, there's about a million different variations that you can do, and in all honesty they're one of very few hand painted nail designs that I can actually pull off. The inspiration to do this mani came from the polishes I used to do it, mainly two of the polishes from the heroine.nyc Winter Wishes Collection. The polishes I chose aren't necessarily the first pairing that cames to mind for this collection, but that's sort of what really inspired me. 

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Yesterday was an exciting day. I'm not even American, but I tuned in to the inauguration just like, I'm sure, loads of other non-Americans who were eager to watch the US usher in a new administration. And it was lovely, it was. The ceremony of it all was beautiful and inspiring and all of that... but honestly, I spent most of the day having a moment with the coats and by mid-afternoon I just couldn't wait to get home and put some coat inspired nail art on my nails - because apparently this is just how my brain processes seeing something I love, "Must put on nails now."

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I must admit, so many of the ideas that I have for Christmas nails this year are inspired by other nail artists and today's mani is definitely one of those. This mani from Delishious Nails has been one that I've been completely in love with from the first time I saw it and it very, very much inspired the polishes and design that I chose for this mani. I skipped adding the reindeer to my mani specifically because I loved this little peek-a-boo through the snowy layered evergreens to this glowing, flakie, glittery base, but I definitely have to give a nod to the mani that inspired this one because I just absolutely love it. 

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So... For today's mani, I gave myself a bit of a challenge. I absolutely love Halloween nails, but I woudn't necessarily call any of the designs I tend to do at this time of year particularly "sophisticated", so I found myself sitting down and asking myself what would a sophisticated Halloween mani look like. Ultimately, I think this is a sort of subjective question, because I think the idea of sophistication would likely eliminate nail art entirely for some people while others would take a different view. Sophistication is, I think, generally a really subjective notion overall. Anyway, I think that this spiderweb mani with a modified french tip and a matte top coat is about as close as I can get to my idea of what "sophisticated" means. 

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As I was swatching the ASP Long Wear Polishes*, I definitely found myself wanting to pair basically all of the shades I got to try out together in one nail art look... but I think that's excessive even for me, so I decided to reign myself in a little bit. I had a sort of vague idea of what I wanted to do, inspired by a lot of other nail artists who've done this kind of speckled, color blocked minimalist nail art. I feel like 2020 has really brought some great designs and techniques for minimalist nail art that's still excites my nail-maximalist heart. Anyway, this mani sort of came together as I was doing it and I changed course a couple of times in the process, but I love the final result - and the fact that it very much gave my cozy sock vibes!

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Honestly, I feel like this mani has been basically years in the making. I've always, always, always wanted to create a mani using this leaves image from the WhatsUpNails B044r From Ground Comes Life stamping plate and I've been holding off hoping for a fall mani... and then I just couldn't figure out what shades I wanted to use to create it. In fact, I've tried a few times already and nothing I tried felt like it did justice to just how much I love this image. Ultimately, I paired it with one of my favorite indie polishes and some of my favorite colours and I love how it turned out.... but hoo boy, was it a process to get here. 

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The technique that I used for this mani is one that I've sort of fallen in love with this past year. I feel like there's definitely a push towards abstract nails at the moment, with a lot of different techniques employed to create them, but personally I'm a big fan of adding little swipes of dry brushing to the nails and then adding in some sort of graphic stamping image. I had the idea for this mani sort of peripherally in my mind, but I didn't really have a colour story planned until I picked up a couple of new polishes from Londontown that felt like they would work perfectly together and fall into our #CBBxManiMonday Fall Shades theme for September and a plan came together.

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As I continue to try out more of these gorgeous shimmer polishes from Starrily, I am seriously, seriously impressed with the formulas. Honestly, I'm not often drawn to shimmer shades, but these ones have no only really, really impressed me with formulas, but the choices when it comes to the actual shades. I have a pretty significant nail polish collection at this point and what has been drawing me to indie polish so much lately is the uniqueness of so many of the shades. Even a shade like Moon Glow*, which may look sort of basic in the bottle, has such a unique look to it that it really does stand out. 

Hey guys! I'm taking a little Staycation this week, tucking into the messy bun, no bra, cozy life for a few days and I'm loving it. It's also meant that I've been able to spend a little extra time at my nail desk putting together some upcoming mani's as I get ready for my favorite time of year - Halloween nails! Anyway, sometimes when I sit down to do my nails, I don't really have any idea what I'm doing and I just wait for inspiration to hit as I'm doing it, and that's definitely what happened with today's nail art. 

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ILOVEFALL. Ahem. Seriously, though, now that the calendar page has flipped and September has brought with it the permission to leave summer behind and fall head first into fall, I am a bouncing ball of excitement. For this month's #CBBxManiMonday theme, we're doing Fall Shades and I very excitedly pulled out some from my collection and... promptly just smashed them all onto my nails? Literally though... for this mani, that's exactly what I did. 

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Hey guys! For this week's Summer Lingo themed #CBBxManiMonday, I went with the word mermaid. I love scales nail art and I had some random nail stencils that have been hanging out in my collection for years that I decided to give a go. Full coverage nail vinyls have always been kind of tricky for me, but I decided to use them to make decals and I'm... kind of obsessed, as I tend to be. 

For this week's Summer Lingo themed #CBBxManiMonday, I've got the word Festival and I pretty much immediately knew what I wanted to do with it... but I wasn't quite sure how to do it. Honestly, as I was sitting there thinking about how I was going to do Tie Dye nails, I considered hand painting (ugh) and water marbling (double ugh) and I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled through inspiration photos, but couldn't figure out how I wanted to do it. And then I was looking through old nail art that I'd done and realized that I already had the perfect technique in my arsenal to get exactly the look I wanted - the smoosh! 

For this month's #CBBxManiMonday Nail Art Roulette, we knew that we absolutely had to include Rainbow as one of our colour stories because we all love to celebrate Pride every year with nail art. I got SUPER lucky with my random number generator and landed on Texture as my theme, which we decided would refer to texture in terms of glitter, flakies or anything that would give an interesting... well, texture to the look, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do. (Although, to be honest, I probably would have made something very similar to this mani with a few of the possible pairings that could have come up....) Anyway, I put together this glittery Sharpie rainbow base, added some negative space heart stamping, and am completely in love with the look!

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Sometimes I just get an idea in my head of nail art that I want to do and I can't shake it out until I actually get it onto my nails. As I was swatching the Essie Spring 2020 Collection*, I got this idea in my head for pairing two of the polishes together and I just couldn't shake it so I just had to get it on my nails. It happens, right?