My Christmas Nails: Pink and Grey Sweater Nails

I finally picked my Christmas nail design, and I'm really happy with how my mini-series of Christmas/holiday themed nail art wrapped up (haha, that's a pun!). This design was inspired by this look from Nailstorming. I've always liked pink and grey together, so I chose that color scheme for a soft, pretty winter design with just enough glitter that reminded me of a cozy winter sweater.

For this design, I used Sally Hansen Hard as Nails in Hard-core Party as my baby pink base, then Julep Devon as my grey. The glitter is Zoya Lux (word on the street is that Zoya PixieDusts are going away in 2015, so if you like this one, you'll want to pick it up soon). Lux has pretty good opacity, but carefully dabbed over the baby pink of Hard-core Party gave it a lighter, more subtle sparkling pink snow effect. One warning about Hard-core Party: the color is lovely, but like many pale pastels, it's very streaky. Here I used a coat of matte topcoat in between layers to limit the number of coats of polish needed for decent coverage.

I've seen several different methods of doing the fair isle snowflake, so I sort of cobbled them together for mine. First, I carefully striped Devon once horizontally and once vertically over the pink base, meeting in the center of the nail. Then I made another set of diagonal stripes from top right to bottom left and vice versa. Next I pulled out my detail brush and made a triangular tip between the lines at the top of each wedge. Finally, I used a small brush to fill in outside the tips and dotted a daub of Lux in the center.

I loved this design, and as I get more practiced on my detail work, I'd love to recreate or do a similar design again. One holiday design I drooled over but didn't do myself this year was a full fair isle mani, so that may be on the docket for next season. If you're interested in a pictorial on the snowflake, let me know as well-it will be great practice. I hope you've had a great holiday season, whether you celebrate yourself or not. Now to start plotting my New Year's Eve mani!