2013 Favorites.

At the end of 2012 I compiled my favorite manicures from the year for you and shared them in a post. Throughout 2013 I enjoyed having that post to look back on and see the designs I consider my best all in one post. Which led me to the easy decision that I had to do a similar post at the end of 2013, and somehow we are at that point in time already! 

And here are the favorites I selected in no particular order...

 Patriotic Explosion Nails

 Holographic Bling Nails

 Ombre Leopard Spot Nails

 Metallic Stone Nails

 Pizza Nails

Summer Sunrise Nails

 Glitzy Turquoise Stone Nails

Rose Water Decal Nails

During my reflection on my manicures of 2013 there was a significant difference in the quantity of designs as opposed to in 2012. And my goal for 2014 is to improve on that and post more often. In order to kick the year off right I'll be posted new nail art everyday in January, and you can expect the first post tomorrow!

Butter London Patent-Gel Review.

For the most part I'm very loyal to my Seche Vite top and basecoats. However, when I received the Butter London Paten-Gel Flawless top and basecoats I was very curious about how comparable to a gel manicure they could be. 

I usually don't keep a manicure on for more than a few days, making the long lasting aspect of a gel manicure unnecessary. But I decided to but these to the test during a week where I wanted my manicure to last through finals, Christmas shopping, and traveling home for the holidays. 

I gave the topcoat and basecoat an extra hard test by using them with all glitter polishes, which of course tend to chip very quickly. And I'm happy to say that after my week with this manicure my nail polish has worn a little bit at the tips and suffered very minimal chipping.

I wouldn't say it's quite like a gel manicure (although I've never had one myself) since they did chip a little, but I'll definitely be using these more in the future.

I also tried out a few new polishes (and polish brands that are new to me) for this manicure. I used Mr. Positivity and Atom + Eve from the Sephora Formula X collection and Jenna Hipp Flair Your Affair. I loved these polishes and they made for the perfect holiday manicure.

Merry Christmas Eve!

Candy Cane Heart Nails.

I decided to do my first holiday manicure of the season for a Christmas party last week. I did a bunch of Christmas designs last year so I wasn't sure what to choose until I was inspired by this candy cane hearts manicure. 

I chose to skip the faded look of my inspiration mani and opt out of the typical bright Christmas colors and instead chose darker, winter appropriate shades. The polishes I used for this design were Zoya Gemma, American Apparel Port, and a LA Colors gold glitter striping polish. The white was done with acrylic paint.

I received a lot of compliments on these and I thought they were just festive enough without being too much!

Born Pretty Star Stickers Review.

I have another Born Pretty Store review for you today! The product I have to talk about are glitter star stickers. I have them in six colors; silver, white, hot pink, black, purple, and pale pink. 

For today's manicure I used two different sizes of stars in the white color. The white has a very pretty iridescent glitter that reminded me of snow. 

The base color I used is Wet n Wild Saved by the Blue (I hadn't broken this color out in forever but I love it!) So far the stars have received very positive reactions and the stars in combination with the blue have elicited comparisons to the 4th of July, Boogie Nights, and Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders.

These work great as an easy way to make any manicure special. They're of course super simple to use, my only tip is to use a thick top coat because they're not completely flat!

Born Pretty also sent me a couple of accessories; a bow ring and a pink lipstick pen which I've been getting a lot of use out of lately.

It's easy to forget that Born Pretty has non-nail related things since they have so many great nail art products. But they have plenty of cute things that aren't related to nails, these are just two examples!

If you want to order one of these items or anything else from BPS you can get 10% off with the coupon code below!

Winter Stone Nails.

It's finals week (or weeks as it happens to be at my school) and one of my final projects was all about nail art. Part of the project involved a how-to section, and the design I thought would be easy and fun to teach was water spotting. Instead of teaching off a water spotted manicure I've done on the past I decided to do a new one using nice icy winter colors.

The polishes I used were Wet n Wild French White Creme, CND Asphalt, and Color Club Lumin-icecent. The white was my base color and then I water spotted with the CND and Color Club polishes over top.

The project also involved doing nail art on a few other people. Here are the manicures I did for them that I instagrammed earlier in the week. I especially liked the one on top, I'll have to break out my striping tape again soon!

In other news, I can't promise too many more posts during the rest of December because of finals and holiday busyness. However, I've decided that since last year I enjoyed my attempt to post everyday in December, I'll do the same thing for January. So, come January 2014 I'm planning to post nail art everyday. Feel free to let me know if there are any manicures in particular you would like to see during that time!