CND Shellac - Limited Edition Christmas 2012 Colours

Without flash

With flash

Well it wouldn't be Christmas without showing you some swatches of CND's Limited Edition Holiday 2012 colours. Do you remember this post from the Autumn when I told you about the exciting new release? Well, you know me, I got my hands on a set as soon as I possibly could and this Christmas I've lost count of the number of manicures I've done using the festive shades.

Ruby Ritz is essentially a red glitter and Tinsel Toast is a gold glitter. The top two photos show off the colours with and without flash. The lovely Tyra wearing Ruby Ritz with Tinsel Toast as an accent nail.

I ended up doing a lot of glitter manicures this season, and I found that it was best to layer two coats of Ruby Ritz over one coat of Red Baroness to get a more intense, solid, glittery look. Tinsel Toast is hard to intensify by layering over another colour as there are none quite the same shade of gold, so instead I used three coats to make sure there was a full coat of gold glitter.

I felt a little sorry for Tinsel Toast as it was neglected in favour of the red by most people, so that's what I opted for as my own Christmas manicure - pictured below.

I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas and here's to a very Happy New Year :)

Disclaimer - Stock photo of limited edition colours is not my own, it is courtesy of the Sweet Squared Facebook page here. All products used for this manicure were bought myself, for more info about myself and CND Shellac please check out my disclaimer page here. I might not be a professional, but I sure love me some Shellac nail art :)

CND Shellac Christmas Nail Art - #4 Iridescent Ice Queen

Iridescent Ice Queen  - glitzy enough for both Christmas and New Year. These are Maddie's, you haven't seen her since here as she is usually favouring the classic French, but for this Winter she wanted to glam it up a little more.

We opted for one of her favourite colours - Moonlight and Roses, but to make it stand out a little more we used some Studio White underneath. If I remember correctly it was one coat of Studio White then two of Moonlight and Roses (curing for 120 seconds after each). I then mixed up a glitter pastes of Mother of Pearl, Gosh Nail Glitter in Silver, some white iridescent nail glitter and CND Additive in Spectrum Shimmer. I placed a piece of striping tape diagonally across each nail - to get a nice crisp line - and painted the glitter paste on the cuticle side of the diagonal. I carefully removed the striping tape and then cured before adding top coat and curing one last time (probably for 180 seconds due to the number of layers).

Apologies for the grow out in these photos, I forgot to take one when I first did them and didn't see Maddie for another week or so after, so these are actually about a week and a half old - still shiny and chip free!!

Disclaimer - All products used for this manicure were bought myself, for more info about myself and CND Shellac please check out my disclaimer page here. I might not be a professional, but I sure love me some Shellac nail art :)

CND Shellac Christmas Nail Art - #3 Blue Glitter Fade & Snowflakes

Blue glitter and Cream Puff can only mean one thing... more snowflakes! Here's another Christmas nail art design for you, in Shellac of course. As modelled by the one and only Stacey (duh??!).

Stacey wanted something much more festive for Christmas but would also carry her through to New Year. So naturally we went straight for the glitters. Now the layers to this are quite complex, so bear with me :)

Firstly I painted a coat of Studio White as a base colour, cured, then added a coat of a glitter paste (made up of Moonlight and Roses mixed with an iridescent white glitter) over the top and cured again.

I then mixed up a different glitter paste of Zillionaire, Gosh Nail glitters in Silver and Blue Sapphire, CND Glitter Additives in Blue and Silver Holographic in my palette. I painted the blue glitter paste in a glitter fade from the cuticles down, so that the white at the tip looked almost like a snowy landscape along the nail, and cured.

Finally, I used a small detailer brush and my Cream Puff to create star like snowflakes and a dotting tool to add the snow. I cured the white, added top coat, cured for one last time (180 seconds though this time due to all the layers) and voila!

Glittery blue Christmas/New Year nails, done.

Disclaimer - All products used for this manicure were bought myself, for more info about myself and CND Shellac please check out my disclaimer page here. I might not be a professional, but I sure love me some Shellac nail art :)

CND Shellac Christmas Nail Art - #2 Red, Green & White

With flash

Finally, a little break today so I can get posting these Christmas manicures! Here's the second one of the season, in Shellac again of course, but this time it's Gemma. You've yet to see Gemma on here but I have some of her ideas to post about soon, she likes to push the boat out with nail art, almost as much as Stacey!

She ummed and ahhhed over different ideas, and as she couldn't decide on just one, we decided to mix it up with something different on each nail. Gemma was set on red, green and white so we then took a little while to decide on what arrangement of colours we'd do the designs in. After much deliberation we came up with red and green as a base and then green and white for nail art detail. 

As you can see below, the first, middle and little fingers got the Wildfire treatment - the perfect Christmas red. The thumb and the ring finger got a glittery Christmas green glitter paste. Now Shellac don't do a classic 'green' so we improvised - in a palette I mixed a couple of drops of Pretty Poison with a couple of drops of Hotski to Tchotchke and added some Gosh Nail glitter in Jade Green - it made the perfect Christmas Tree Shade.

Base colour - before nail art

I then painted the various patterns on top of the base colours pictured above. Gemma decided on the following:

First finger - snowflake and snow design in Cream Puff painted with a detailer brush
Middle finger - present ribbon design using the green glitter paste from before, painted with a detailer brush
Ring finger and thumb - left as the green glitter base
Little finger - candy cane stripes, thick and thin, in Cream Puff painted with a detailer brush

Without flash

These were nowhere near as time consuming as I thought they might be; it gave me the idea to try out more of the mix'n'match WAH nails designs I see on Instagram. What do you think?

Disclaimer - All products used for this manicure were bought myself, for more info about myself and CND Shellac please check out my disclaimer page here. I might not be a professional, but I sure love me some Shellac nail art :)

CND Shellac Christmas Nail Art - #1 Snowflakes

Merry Christmas! Now that the hectic period is mostly over, I can finally get around to posting some of the Christmas manicures that I've done over the past fortnight. First up is Kate, remember her from here, here and here? She really wanted some snowflake nails so I adopted a design from Cheryl - a nail technician that I know.

I picked out Midnight Swim, one of the new Winter Wonderland 2012 colours, for the perfect night sky background. It is a glorious dark navy blue with a slight hint of shimmer. To paint on the snowflakes I used my small detailer brush and Cream Puff to get a nice crisp white finish. I made sure the snowflakes overlapped the edge of the nails to make them appear as though they were falling from the sky. I finished off the look by adding some drops of snow with a dotting tool.

Very simple yet extremely effective, although exceedingly time consuming - three hours to be exact! Painting the snowflakes was painstaking!

What do you think? I'm quietly very proud of these :)

Disclaimer - All products used for this manicure were bought myself, for more info about myself and CND Shellac please check out my disclaimer page here. I might not be a professional, but I sure love me some Shellac nail art :)

New CND Shellac Colours for Spring 2013!

STOP PRESS!! I have one simple word for you, that will shock, amaze and excite you all at once....


....PASTEL.

Yep, you read correct, pastel. More specifically CND have decided to launch 5 new Shellac colours in Spring 2013 and they are all pastel shades! Hallelujah!

Don't believe me? Check out their press release here, but if you can't wait for the link to load, check out the Sweet Dreams Collection of pretty pastels below:

CND Shellac Grapefruit Sparkle

CND Shellac Cake Pop

CND Shellac Lilac Longing

CND Shellac Azure Wish

CND Shellac Limeade

I would like to choose my favourite but I know full well that following their release in March 2013, I will be adding all 5 to my shopping basket.

So what do you think of CND's Spring offerings? This Sweet Dreams collection has to be the most exciting CND Shellac launch for me yet! Eeek, I can't wait!

 Disclaimer - Photos are not my own, they are courtesy of the CND Press Release here.