Tag: fall nails

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Half Moons & Gold Studs 

Happy Monday! How was everyone else’s weekend? We’ve been starting to pack for moving which is about as much fun as it sounds… I hate packing & I hate moving. (& I haven’t even starting thinking about moving my 1000+ nail polishes yet.) 

So what am I sharing to cheer myself up after a packing haze? One of my favourite go-to designs—the half moon. & thought I’d share a quick pictorial on how easy these actually are to create! & no special vinyls are needed!

The products used for this manicure were:

  • Base Coat: OPI Natural Nail Base Coat
  • Top Coat: Seche Vive
  • China Glaze Fancy Pants
  • China Glaze Glamcore
  • NailStuff.ca gold Mixed Decoration Nail Wheel

Paint your base colour & apply quick dry top coat. Let dry completely, roughly about 20 minutes depending on the top coat you use. 

Once your nails are completely dry, pull out your pack of paper hole reinforcements & apply at the base of your nail. Make sure to press down at each end. 

Repeat on all 5 nails. I always do one hand at a time. 

Press down each side of hole reinforcement (to make sure polish won’t bleed under) & then quickly paint second colour over top. A one coat polish works best, but she make sure base colour is covered. 

Immediately remove your reinforcement. 

Repeat steps on all fingers & then seal in design with top coat. Bam! Almost instant half moons (with a few steps in between). I loved the blue with purple but I wanted to add a little more of a snazzy finish to my nails. I’ve been obsessing about this wheel of nail studs lately adding it to a lot of my manicures lately so I figured it would be the perfect addition to this design. 

For my accent nail, I applied some blobs of coat, then picked up my studs with a wet nail art brush & arranged them. I always make sure to pull my studs out of the wheel ahead of applying them, as it takes less time trying to find them. Also, sometimes you will have to dab on more clear polish/top coat to make sure the studs stick. Also I always seal my studs in with top coat so no edges catch & get pulled off. 

What do you think of this half moon? How do you create your half moon designs? Let me know in the comments below! 🌙

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Kitty Cat Nails 🖤

Happy Halloween Eve everybody! 🎃

So confession time: I’m the queen of the last minute Halloween costume. Seriously I was the girl always looking for something to wear the day before Halloween (or worse, the day of Halloween). This year I’ve got our Halloween all ready, but if it wasn’t already prepared, then I would probably go with last minute Halloween costume go to: a kitty 🐱. & if I were going as a kitty for Halloween, these would be the perfect nails to go along with that costume!

Polishes used for this design:

  • Base Coat: OPI Natural Nail Base Coat
  • Top Coat: Seche Vive
  • Essie Wrap Me Up
  • Essie Merino Cool
  • Sally Hansen Hard As Nails Black Heart
  • Sally Hansen I ♥️ Nail Art Pen in Red
  • Small detail brush & dotting tool from Bundle Monster

These nails were surprisingly easy to achieve. The leopard print is just blobs of colour outlines with black using your small detail brush. The cat is a bit harder to do, but not by too much—just takes a little bit patience to get it done. & if you feel like you can’t freehand a kitty, you can just as easy wear leopard print on all your fingers instead or use a sticker or decal. 

Yep, that’s a onesie & what inspired my colour choices for this leopard print. Who else has totally worn a onesie for a Halloween costume? I mean, they’re pretty perfect for Trick or Treating! Keep you warm & then you immediately can hop into bed (with a chocolate bar or two or fifteen!)

What is your favourite Halloween snack? I’m totally a gummy candy girl. The hubs & I are taking the little guy trick or treating a few places & we already have the candy situation figured out… he gets any chocolate as I’m lactose intolerant, I get the gummy candies & we’ll split the chips. & the little guy… well he gets to be adorable in his baby flash costume. 

♥️

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SWATCH SUNDAY—China Glaze Cast A Spell

Happy Sunday everyone! Hope you’re not too hung over from whatever Halloween shenanigans you got up to this weekend! (& hey candy bar hangovers count too!) I thought for Swatch Sunday this week, I would delve deep into my stash & grab a Halloween shade to share with you! 

This is China Glaze Cast A Spell which the internet tells is from the 2012 Wicked collection. I picked up my bottle a year or two ago in a clearance bin at Chatters—one of my favourite places to find lost polish treasures—so it’s relatively new to me. 

Cast A Spell is a blacky green thickly packed full of golden flecks of shimmer. The formula was fantastic, & it applied in two super easy coats. It’s one of those shades that glows on the nail, & I can see why it would be part of a Halloween polish collection—it’s the perfect shade for the modern Witch who cares about her mani while out casting her spells or buying eye of newt from her local Trader Joes. 

Seriously though, this polish is gorgeous. I only own a few Halloween shades in my extensive stash, & I think 90% of them are from past China Glaze collections. They just do extremely well when it comes to Halloween collections & you can’t help but just love them. Cast A Spell is outside my usual polish comfort zone colour wise, but there is just something about it that makes me not want to take it off. It’s a great Autumn shade that I don’t think exclusively needs to be kept for Halloween night. 

& for fun I added some pumpkin stickers I purchased at the Dollar Store on vacation for an instant accent nail! 🎃


Do you have a favourite Halloween polish/collection either from this year or years prior? Let me know in the comments below!

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Halloween Skull Nails 💀 

We are only FOUR days away from Halloween which means I only have a couple more days to get in a few more spooky designs. My next Halloween design is one that is quite popular on Instagram—Jack Skeleton’s face (or just a skull since I don’t want any Disney copyright person coming after me!) 

For this design, I wanted to do something quick & easy for those who may be looking for a last minute Halloween nail design that isn’t too complicated to do. 

  • Base Coat: OPI Natural Nail Base Coat
  • Top Coat: Cutex Quick Dry Top Coat
  • Revlon Elusive
  • Ardene Ice Mist
  • Sally Hansen Hard To Get 
  • Kiss Products Nail Art Striper in Black 
  • Bundle Monster small nail art brush
  • Bundle Monster dotting tool 

This design was super simple to do! I decided to freehand my stripes because I wanted my stripes to look somewhat imperfect. I also like that they’re over such a sheer base colour. These really are super simple to do & I feel like you can accomplish them at any nail art level. My eyes/nose were the hardest to get right but even though they’re not perfectly symmetrical, they still turned out fun & Halloween-y. 🎃 For the eyes, I just created blobs using my larger size dotting tool & the mouth length using my striper. I then went in with my smaller brush & created the teeth & nose. 

What are you wearing on your nails for Halloween? Do you have any Halloween designs you’d like to see me take a stab at before Tuesday? Leave your suggestions here or on Instagram & I’ll try my best! 🖤

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Vacation Nails! 

This week, I took a mini vacation with our Lil Bubs to visit my parents up in Northern New Brunswick. Usually when I travel I tend to bring an assorted variety of nail goodies with me, because I know I will need to change up my manicure. However, because I know my Mum has quite the stash of polish on hand (she’s started painting sea glass jewellery peices with it—I’ll share a picture at the end!) I decided to leave my polishes behind for the opportunity to play around with the many shades she owns. 

For this manicure, the polishes I used were:

  • Base Coat: OPI Nail Envy
  • Top Coat: Seche Vive 
  • My Beauty Spot unnamed dark purple
  • L’Oréal Because I’m Worth It
  • L’Oréal The True Gold Transforming Top Coat
  • Essence Metal Glam Steel-ing the Scene 
  • Kiss Products zig zag Nail Vinyls 

These are definitely Fall nails. I’ve been really feeling gold & purple lately (especially together). I also totally forgot how good Steel-ing the Scene looks over dark colours (I also have a bottle in my stash at home.) This is a great combination which sadly I couldn’t capture as well as I would have liked thanks to some fairly dull bathroom lighting. Even still, I really dig how this mani turned out. At first I wasn’t quite sure but the more I stared at it, the more I like how everything came together. 

& just for fun, here is one of the beautiful pieces of sea glass my mum painted (using nail polish!) for the jewelry she’s been making. I have a couple pieces she’s made & they’re such pretty statement pieces. 


What do you think of this vacation design? Do you do your nails while on vacation or stick with what you leave with? What are your vacation nail essentials? Let me know in the comments below!