Tacky Holidays

There’s always at least one ugly sweater prompt floating around Instagram for December. It’s tradition and it’s fun if you’ve embraced the truth that ugly really means tacky. And I love tacky. The more I look at these nails, the more I love them. I’m always one for rainbows, but I tend to use them in an organized fashion (as you’ll see later today). With this one I just slapped colors on the nails and stamped chaotic nail patterns on top. It went surprisingly fast once I got started.

A brightly tacky holiday nail art with a rainbow of holographic nail foils and black holiday patterns with trees and flowers stamped on top. — Tacky Holidays

Flipside Nails

For an extra treat, we added yum to the belly of the beasts. I probably should have been pickier about the stamps I applied to my clear falsies before I painted the rest of this nail art design, but even meh pickups look stunning. Flipside is so addicting. I’ve had to convince myself several times that I don’t need more because only two kinds of clear falsies feels so limiting. I should probably finish one of my other “kinds” first though. 😂

Flipside poinsettia nails with a snazzy poinsettia stamping image against a silver (chrome) background. — Tacky Holidays

Nail art products used

Flipside Polishes:: Nail stamping poinsettias with Maniology’s “Wolfish“ with a background of Essie’s “No Place Like Chrome“
Base Polish:: Zoya’s “Seraphina“
Nail Foil:: Used most of the colors from Maniology’s ManixMe box special item of metallic nail foils with their foil glue.
Stamping Polish:: UberChic Beauty’s “Pure Black“
Reverse Stamping Polish:: Essie’s “No Place Like Chrome” for the flowers
Stamping Plates:: “Major Dijit-08“ (flipside poinsettia pattern); Maniology “M167“ (crazy patterns in: poinsettia, Christmas tree, Christmas tree forest)

Items in italics are debuting on the blog for the first time.

It has been a long time since I used nail foils. They just sit quietly in the drawers behind me; out of sight and out of mind. The last time I tried ended up being a fail. Maniology included some sort of soft blue-green patterned nail foil with their literary ManixMe box and I tried using them as a background and couldn’t get them to apply very well so I gave up and painted a completely different design (Anne of Green Gables if you’re wondering).

This time I succeeded. It probably helped that the foils are solid colors and I was going for chaos so it didn’t matter how they applied. I used Maniology’s nail foil glue and possibly didn’t do the best application? It left brush strokes that made the foils apply in streaks. Luckily that smoothed out with the water-based top coat (a must with foils or they dissolve and break up). I don’t know if the problem is me, the product or the age of the product. (Nail foil glue can’t take the cold. Never order it in winter.) Thusly, I currently I can’t recommend Maniology’s glue, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually bad. Fun!

I really want to play with the nail foils again. Hopefully I will have more answers for you then.