September Monthly Mani Favourites


Crazy to think that another month has gone by! & that means itโ€™s time to round up my favourite Fall manicures from the last month. This month saw lots of Fall designs & colours & Fall coffee drinks. 

Did your favourite manicure from the last month make the cut? Itโ€™s always so hard for me to narrow down my favourites, but I have to admit Iโ€™m really in love with how my coffee nails turned out! 

Now onto the October (& Halloween ๐ŸŽƒ) designs! 

Happy National Coffee Day Nails! โ˜•๏ธ


You know I love a good excuse to celebrate a holiday & what better holiday to celebrate than National Coffee Day! I joined my girls in #thenailartsquad for some caffeine inspired manicures in order to celebrate this day in style! 

Obvious if weโ€™re doing coffee inspired nails, I had to do something Starbucks inspired! I also thought I would pull out some of the acrylic paints I recently picked up for my freehanding details. 



For this design, the products I used were:

  • Base Coat: OPI Natural Nail Base Coat
  • Top Coat: Sally Hansen Diamond Flash
  • Essie Mochacino
  • Essie Cocktails & Coconuts 
  • Sally Hansen Hard To Get
  • Acrylic Paints (black, white, brown & green)
  • Silicone Mat
  • Tiny dotting tool 
  • Small Detail Brush

I had this idea of how I wanted this design to turn out, & it turned out exactly how I imagined in my head… I love when that happens! I used my pink silicone mat to create my โ€œlatte artโ€ drag marble decals which (I think) turned out really good. I also tested out my acrylic paints for the first time, & they were so easy to use for nail art! I definitely understand why they are such a popular option for nail artโ€”I would have had a much harder time creating my little Starbucks cup using just regular nail polish. Now I want to buy even more colours to test out designs! 

What do you think of these coffee nails in honour of National Coffee Day? Whatโ€™s you favourite coffee drink of choice? Obviously I love pumpkin spice this time of year, but if weโ€™re picking favourites I absolutely canโ€™t wait for Gingebread lattes to return! 
Donโ€™t forget to check out the hashtag #thenailartsquad to see all the coffee themed designs, as well as our past collaborations! 

Easy Geode Marble nails using Born Pretty Store Clear Jelly Silicone Stamper item #38611

Happy Wednesday! Today I have a two in one for you–a review of this clear silicone jellly stamper (item # 38611) sent to me for review & a new technique for creating quick & easy geode nails using it! 

I used this stamping head for a few stamped manicures (including this design) but I found it was a bit too squishy for my likes for capturing the image & I prefer this Born Pretty stamper. I still wanted to see what I could do with it because it is a great product, so I decided to play around with it using a silicone mat & discovered it was great for creating these geode style nails. The size of this stamping head is especially perfect for achieveing this look. The size of means you can stamp down in one go (which is very important for getting your design to look like this). 

For this manicure, this polishes I used are:

  • Base Coat: Cutex Brittle Nail Fix
  • Top Coat: Quick Dry Top Coat 
  • Essie Bikini So Teeny
  • Essie Mint Candy Apple
  • Essie Pool Side Service
  • Essie Peach Side Babe 
  • Essie Leggy Legend 
  • Born Pretty Store 3.9cm Clear Jelly Silicone Stamper
  • Silicone craft mat (or another nail art mat… Born Pretty Store also makes a great affordable one! )
  • Small dotting tool or water marble tool. 
  • Small nail art brush. 

I tried to make a video of how to do this, but I’m still working on figuring out the best angle/set up but this video was farther away than I would have liked. Hopefully I’ll figure how to film a video where you can really see what I’m doing. But here is a rough example of how I created this design using a stamper. 

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  1. Paint your nails your base shade of choice (I used Bikini So Teeny for mine)
  2. Gather all your shades around your silicone mat & make sure to pre open the bottles. I forgot to do this, & it slows down the process some. 
  3. Going colour by colour, drop the polish down on your silicone mat. Try and overlap the shades together. There is no amount of polish to put down but try & make sure you can see a little bit of each other. 
  4. Using a dotting tool, drag you polish through each other. 
  5. Using your stamper, press down on the polish. Next press down again your prepainted nail. The clear stamper is great for this because you can see through & decide which part of the pattern you want to apply. 
  6. Using a small nail art brush, go in & apply small lines of metallic shade (I used Leggy Legend). This is a great way to hide any mistakes. 
  7. Finish off with top coat to seal in design. 


You definitely want to move quickly & carefully when applying it to your nails. When pressing down, don’t move your nail because it will smudge the design which will ruin the geode look of the design. 

This Born Pretty stamper is so perfect for achieving this look. I tried it using a small stamper & it didn’t work well at all. You need that large squishy space for the polish to spread out. I do have a warning–be careful while cleaning this stamper. I used pure acetone to try & clean mine up (I was not thinking) & it caused some clouding of the plastic. So be very careful! 

If you’re looking for a versatile stamper, I would definitely recommend this stamper. Like I said, I had some difficulties using it for actually stamping but that could have something to do with my personal learning curve. However I will always gush about clear stampers because I feel like the options for nail art are endless! & this stamper in particular with its pink shell is just so pretty. 

If youโ€™re interested in ordering this stamper (or something else) from Born Pretty Store feel free to use my discount code COFFK31 to save 10% off any regular price items! Iโ€™ve been ordering from them for years, & I love the wide variety of products you can find for all your nail polish addict needs! 

Spring Drip Marble decals


Have I mentioned enough how much I’m loving my silicone mat? I’ve been having a blast creating fun decals with it. I can’t believe it took me so long to get on the silicone mat trend. That’s me–always behind on the times! But now that I’ve caught up to modern times, I’m having a blast playing around & can’t get enough.

This drip marble is from a few weeks ago. I had decided to pull out a few more Spring-y colours for another drip marble. These are kind of similar to the Earth Day drip marble I created colour wise. I don’t often reach for green shades, but I’m starting to find myself craving them more. They’re great shades for Spring!

For this manicure, I used:

  • Base Coat: Perfect Formula Pink Gel Coat
  • Top Coat: Cutex Quick Dry Top Coat
  • Color Club Almost Famous
  • Essie Strut Your Stuff
  • Essie First Timer
  • OPI Angel With A Lead Foot
  • Silicone Craft Mat

I wanted some fresh colours (& an excuse to wear use my new bottle of Color Club Almost Famous!) I had originally planned to do a yellow to blue gradient with these colours, but decided at the last minute to make these decals instead. & application definitely gets easier with practice.

So what do you think of this manicure & colour combination? I think it looks so fresh! The colours just meld together so well, I’m completely obsessed! ๐Ÿ’›

Drag Marble Decalsย 


If you’ve been around a while, you’ve probably heard me mention before how I can’t water marble. I’ve tried to do it, I really have but the results never turn out quite right. So thanks to rewatching old Simply Nailogilcal videos on YouTube, I wanted to see if I can cheat at watermarble using my silicone mat, ala Cristine!

So for my first Drag Marble decal experiment, I decided to try a couple different designs that would sort of look like watermarble (if you didn’t look too closely). I did about 15 different decals using different polishes to see which colours/polish formulas worked best & picked the three best to apply.

For each manicure I used my silicone craft mat & a water marble tool from Bundle Monster. For how to apply decals, there are lots of useful tutorials on YouTube. I also topped all designs with my Cutex Quick Dry Top Coat.

Continue reading “Drag Marble Decalsย “