Take Your Nails from Grinch to Gorgeous with This Holiday Nail Art How-To

I love winter. Hot cocoa, scarves, fireplaces, snow, Christmas music and movies, and the opportunity to get away with crazy nail art. I love using glitter during the winter months — I think there’s just something special about the way it sparkles in the winter sun. Today, however, I want to show you a simple nail design that I love to rock the week before Christmas. This is an unexpected nail look that’s fun yet understated.

NOTE: The links in here are just to show you what products I used, and not to recommend the particular sites. I purchased everything shown here at Five Below, Ulta, and Walgreens.

The first step is to apply a base coat. I like using Sally Hansen’s Insta-Grip Fast Dry Base Coat, but use whatever you feel comfortable with.

Once that’s dry, apply two coats of red polish. I used ORLY’s Monroe’s Red because it’s a bright Christmas-y color. If you find that the color clashes with your skin tone, use any red that you like. For this design, though, I think it’s better to stick to creams than shimmers. Monroe’s Red does have the subtlest of subtle red shimmer, but you really can’t see it unless you get millimeters away from my nails in the sunlight.

Apply a fast-drying top coat of your choice. At the moment, I’m really loving Poshé, but I’ve never tried Seche Vite, its supposed competitor.

Now for the fun part. Using white polish (I’m using a striper from Color Club), draw a line down the center of your ring fingernail.

Now, take your favorite black polish. Here, I used the striper from Color Club. If you don’t have a striper, no worries — just grab your fave black polish and a fine-tipped paint brush. Draw a line horizontally across the middle of your ring fingernail. Make it thicker than the striping brush itself, but not too thick. Let these two colors dry for a bit, so the next color doesn’t smear the two previous ones.

And, for the pièce de résistance — get out your blingiest gold polish. I chose the Milani holographic nail polish in 3D. Using a fine-tipped paint brush, draw a square around the intersection of the black and white polish. Be sure to make the top and bottom lines of the gold square directly above (and below) the black polish and the left and right gold lines directly next to the white stripe. In other words, make the center of the gold square completely black.

Repeat this process on your other ring fingernail, slap on a top coat and voila! You now have Santa’s belly on your ring fingers. Shake ‘em like a bowl full of jelly! 😉

At this point, feel free to add to your other fingernails. I’ve drawn on Santa hats, presents, and painted on some serious green and red glitter. You could, of course, keep them as is to keep the focus on Santa’s big ol’ belly. My fiancé, who normally couldn’t care less about what I have on my nails, actually thinks these are pretty cool.

Happy holidays!