Holiday Nails Tutorial

 Hello! I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving Holiday! Today I wanted to bring you a Holiday Nails tutorial. I love Pineterest and I always see such cool ideas for nails so I thought I'd try my hand at one of them. I think I was pretty successful and it was so easy to do! So I hope you all enjoy it and try it for yourselves!

 Here is what you will need. You can use any two colors you want but I found that Essie's Beyond Cozy and OPI's Goldeneye went really well together. Goldeneye is such a gorgeous gold glitter color in which the particles are fine so they almost look like a foil or metallic polish but still big enough that it really picks up and reflects light nicely. The reason I chose Beyond Cozy to go with Goldeneye is that it's a silvery glitter polish that is ever so slightly gold toned. It's just a very warm toned silver that suits the warm gold so well. Both colors together will just really pop on the nails even in the dim lighting you might find at a holiday party, banquet or even a night out on the town. They are going to pick up any bit of light and just give you a cool shimmery rich effect. You will also need a base coat, a top coat, and some good old tape. Let's get started!!

 After applying my Essie All in One base coat on clean dry nails I applied two good coats of Goldeneye. I then let my nails dry for a good hour (or an episode of Vampire Diaries) before moving on to the next step. It's very important that they are super dry before moving on so maybe two episodes of Vampire Diaries would have been even better ;)  

 Next I took pieces of tape and aligned them diagonally along my nail as shown in the pictures.

 
*Tip press the tape into the back of your hand a few times to make it less tacky before sticking them onto your nails. That will help prevent the tape from pulling up your polish.

 You can play around with the alignment of the tape. I recommend getting the tape on all of your nails first before moving on so that you can make sure they are even, all going in the right direction, and just so you aren't fiddling with the tape dispenser with wet nails. 

 Once I was happy with my alignment I painted in the exposed section of my nail with two coats of Beyond Cozy.

 Next I gently pulled off the tape. I do this before the polish dries so that if there is any bleedthough under the tape I can easily swipe it away with a fingernail or ever so gently use a Q-tip soaked in Acetone or polish remover to clean up the line so it's nice and crisp. Be careful though not to remove any of the gold polish if you use the remover to fix messy lines.

 So here it is with tape removed and after cleaning up any mistakes or evening out lines.

 Now I finish everything off with my Essie Good to Go top coat. This is a great fast drying top coat that I highly recomend. It's nice and shiny too and makes my manicure last about a week. Especially if I reapply it later in the week to refresh the shine it just lasts forever and ever. I've even noticed with this topcoat that people will ask if I've have gotten a Gel Polish manicure, it just looks soooo good!

 Finally as a last step I take some polish remover (here I'm using Sephora's polish remover) and with a Q-tip I clean up any leftover polish on my cuticles. I don't always do this, often I do my nails the evening  before and leave my cuticles messy and by the morning my polish has fully set so that when I hop in the shower I can easily peel off any polish with hot water and a nail brush. Other times I've removed polish from skin using lotion or cuticle oil after my nails have completely dried and set. It would be interesting to know what others have done, let me know what you have tried in the comments!

 So here we go all done and ready to go! This is how the polish looks in natural lighting, below are shots in a more warmly lit setting that you would find at a holiday party or banquet.

 I think these kind of glittery nails really look dressed up and nice in dimmer warmer lighting. Here I'm wearing a shiny navy blue holiday dress I bought at Windsor a few years ago for a military banquet. The gold bag was a freebie gift for purchasing a Micheal Kors fragrance and the bow ring is from Kate Spade.

SOooooo that is all for this tutorial! I hope you liked it and I'd love to see if anyone tries it out for themselves! Let me know what you think in the comments or if I should do more of these in the future. I was thinking about maybe this could be a once a month thing. Let me know I'd love to hear from you!! Happy Holidays!