Alpine Snowy Nails

I hope everyone had a fantastic christmas! Santa Claus was super generous to my family!

I'm really excited about some polishes I got in my stocking but more on that tomorrow.

So I had been on the fence about what kind of Christmas manicure I wanted, did I want something bright and super christmassy? Or something more subdued and classy but still with a christmas feel?

I ended up going with the latter. I really wanted to try a "Glitter Snow Manicure" I had seen on pinterest.

I was in love with the result. I'm giving you a heads up some of the pictures are absolutely terrible. I paint my nails in my basement and I usually paint them at night, so unlike blogs with great swatches who always use natural light to take amazing nail swatch pictures, my pics are never that good. Get over it. In the pictures the flash really picks up everything you don't see in real life. As I cleaned up the white around my nails (I tried really hard to clean them up before taking pics) the white washed over the skin around my fingernails and while you don't see it in real life it's really noticable in the pictures. The reason I'm still posting the crappy pictures is because even though they showcase the flaws of the manicure they also show the texture of the manicure which was my favourite part.

First I grabbed my OPI Alpine Snow. The Alpine Snow I have is a Matte which I have a love hate relationship with. I love it because it's fast drying and works great when I do Zebra print nails with my nail art pen. But I hate because it usually flakes and chips really easy. So This time I used a technique I saw on Lacquerized. The Nail polish Sandwich. I started with a base coat, I've been using OPI Nail Strengthener because I feel like my nails need a bit of help lately. Then 1 coat of Alpine Snow, then another coat of basecoat (I just used OPI's regular basecoat this time) then another coat of Alpine snow. Let me tell you this manicure wore like a BEAST! It survived opening christmas presents, and changing the sheets on my bed (which usually KILLS my nails) without chipping or anything! Two thumbs up to the Nail Polish Sandwich method!

Then I swiped on a coat of SV top coat and sprinkled some extra fine white glitter on my nails. I did one nail at a time so that the topcoat wouldn't dry before I was ready. The nails were super gorgeous and glittery without a top coat but I needed a manicure that was going to hold up. So I used OPI Top Coat to seal it. I find that the OPI Top Coat works better as a glitter sealer than SV because the OPI is thicker (at least mine is) so it smoothes things out a bit even though it doesn't dry anywhere as fast,

I was so stoked on the results of this. Yes it wasn't super glittery after the top coat was added but I loved it.