Recap: Favorite Nail Art Designs Of 2012

Happy New Year's Eve everyone!

As I promised yesterday, before the year 2013 will be upon us, I want to share with you my favorite nail art manicures I did this past year. I picked only five, because I haven't done a terrible lot of creative designs this year (I love nail art, but I wish I was more talented and less of a perfectionist, lol). So without further ado, let's have a look at my picks.

First up is the Spooky Forest design I wore on Halloween this year. This is probably my favorite nail art project of this year. I just love the combo of newspaper nails, sponging and freehanding and for the first try in newspaper nails, these came out really nice I think.

Another Halloween design that I enjoyed creating and wearing a lot was the Jack'O Lantern drag marble manicure I showed you during my Spooktober series.

Another design I want to show you again is the "Pow" manicure I did following a tutorial from the Wah Book Of Nail Art (which is definitely worth checking out if you're interested in nail designs).

Of course I also had to add my very first gradient manicure to my top 5 list. This one reminds me of summer, sunset and tequila sunrise.

And last but nor least, how can it be, I had to add my beloved Floam gradient design to the list. I just love gradient manicures and I adore Floam, so the two together are just so much fun to look at :D

So that was my personal recap of 2012 as far as nail polish is concerned. 2012 has been an exhausting but great year for me and now I am eagerly waiting for the things to come in 2013 (I have to change jobs and I am curious where it will take me). So to all of you out there, thank you so much for your support and kind comments as well as various chats on Twitter and IG. I have "met" so many wonderful people through blogging and it is safe to say that the nail art community rocks! May the upcoming year hold lots of good things for you and your loved ones.

Have a great New Year's Eve and see you next year :)

<3 Sabine

Recap: My favorite nail polishes 2012

Happy Sunday peeps!

The year 2012 is about to end pretty soon, but before this year is over, I want to share with you some of my most loved nail polishes in 2012. They weren't all released this year, but I got them in 2012, so for me that counts ;) I had a hard time narrowing it down to a reasonable number, so I decided to devide these pictures into two posts. Today I have for you my 12 top picks in nail polishes and tomorrow I am going to show you my top 5 nail art designs I liked most this year.

For more pics and info, read on after the jump (better grab a cup of coffee, this might take a little longer!).

Christmas Skittle Nails - Happy Holidays!

Hello everyone!

Christmas is finally here and I wish all of you and your family a peaceful Christmas season. Amidst your busy schedule, take a break, relax and enjoy! 

For the Holidays this year I decided to go with a skittle manicure, including a candy cane and Christmas tree design as well as some dots and of course one of my beloved Floam polishes :)

Pre-Christmas nails with Ninja Polish - Candy Cane Floam

Happy fourth advent everyone!

I find it unbelievable that tomorrow is going to be Christmas Eve. Where did the year 2012 go? To me, it just flew by way to fast. But usually I am looking forward to the Holidays as they mean spending time with the family and a few relaxing days. I also love Christmas-y decorations and food as well as getting gifts for others. Of course I also love Christmas themed manicures and as you might know by now, I fell in love with the Holiday collection 2012 from the independent nail polish seller Ninja Polish. I already showed you Sapphire Dreams and Shattered Star as well as No Peeking!. Today I have for you another favorite from this collection. It is Candy Cane Floam, which "as part of the Floam polish family, contains fine red and white matte glitters."

Pre-Christmas Nails: Ninja Polish - No Peeking! and China Glaze - Merry Berry

Happy Friday everyone

and it is good to see all of you are still alive and well. Seems like the Maya were wrong predicting the end of the world. So well all live to see another day - and another Christmas-y manicure :D Today I decided to go with China Glaze Merry Berry from their recent Holiday collection. As an accent nail I used another polish from my beloved Ninja Polish Holiday collection named No Peeking!.

Ninja Polish Holiday Collection - Sapphire Dreams & Shattered Star

G'day my dear reader!

I am slowly getting in the Holiday season mood. I baked a truckload of cookies today, which is kind of my personal tradition to get me in the spirit for Christmas. Plus friends and family like to receive some selfmade gifts ;) Do you have all your presents together? I just need a few small things, but every year it gets harder to find something for the beloved ones. 

One thing I got myself for Christmas this year is the Ninja Polish Holiday collection. I accidentally stumbled upon this collection while browsing their website. I was immediately drawn to these 10 polishes. I could not find any swatches of them, but they looked so pretty in their bottles, that I decided to just order them all. The first two I want to share with you today are Sapphire Dreams and Shattered Star. The first is described as "a metalic deep blue and covers opaque easily in 2 coats". It is a jelly blue base loaded with shimmer particles and flecks. To get it opaque and even, I used two thin coats. It dried a bit dull, but one layer of topcoat made everything nice and shiny again.

China Glaze - Frostbite topped with Barry M. - Jewel Britannia

Happy Monday gals,

I hope all of you had a great weekend! I did, even though it was pretty exhausting. On Friday I was officially awarded my PhD, which means I am finally done with studying (at least I hope so) and there will be no more exams in my life - ever. Yay! Needless to say I was pretty excited for this day to come. Preparations for the big party afterwards kept my quite busy throughout Wednesday and Thursday. I have never cooked such giant pots of soup before, but there were around 50 people that had to be fed. But in the end it was a great day, all of my family, friends and co-workers were there to celebrate with me. Sadly all these preparations kept me from blogging and painting my nails throughout this last week :( Initially I had planned to do a very special manicure for the ceremony, but I just didn't find the time to do it. I ended up going there with nothing but Nail Magic treatment on my nails. But now I have a few days off before Christmas, which means I will have plenty of time to play with Christmas designs, so stay tuned for that!

Today I have a manicure I wore earlier last week and that I liked a lot, so I wanted to share it with you. In my previous post I showed you China Glaze Frostbite, one of my favorite blue nail polishes for Winter. After two days, there was a bit of tip wear, but I didn't want to take it off. So I decided to layer Barry M. Jewel Britannia over it.

Winter is here! China Glaze - Frostbite

Good evening everyone,

this past weekend we had the first bit of snow for this winter. I am not a huge fan of snow, because usually traffic breaks down quickly here and having to go to work in this weather is super annoying. But snow also means it is the perfect time to pull out China Glaze's Frostbite. This gorgeous shade of blue has been on my wishlist for a long time. When I went to NYC back in April, I finally found it at Ulta and had to carry it home with me. It is one of my favorite blues, so bright and glowing. But see for yourself:

Essie - Head Mistress

Good evening everyone

and happy Friday! I hope all of you had a great week and have even better plans for the weekend. I desperately need to do some Christmas gift shopping this weekend, because I do not have a single present, yet. I don't really like shopping on weekends during December, because the city center is crowded. My city has a quite famous Christmas fair that is visited by thousands of tourists every day. That makes shopping quite stressful, but sadly I do not have the time to do it during the week. Well, at least I can have a mulled wine while I am there ;)

Today I have for you another red manicure. I do not know about you, but a nice red on my nails makes me feel feminine and sexy, lol. It just has to be the right kind of red that suits my super pale skin tone. Essie's Head Mistress from the Stylenomics collection for Fall 2012 is such a red. It might not be the most unique shade in the world, but that doesn't make it any less pretty.

#PolishDays - Bling!

Hi gals!

It is that time of the month again! Here is another round of the Polish Days series, where lots of nail polish bloggers team up and create manicures inspired by a certain topic and publish them on every first Tuesday of the month.

December's theme is Bling!, which leaves a lot of room for ideas. Still I had a tough time coming up with a creative idea, so I ended up picking my favorite red nail polish Perceval from a-England and did an accent nail with OPI's Crown Me Already, which is very bling-y I think ;) 

Since we're in the Holiday season, red is the perfect color to show off. At first I wanted to add some rhinestones, but I felt like this would be over the top, because Perceval itself is really vibrant and eye catching. So I went for a sparkly silver glitter accent nail instead. Crown Me Already is dense enough to be worn on its own and stands out nicely against the red. To me this combo even looks elegant and classy, so I would definitely wear this for the Christmas dinner with the family ;)

I hope you liked this simple but pretty manicure. I cannot wait to see what everyone else comes up with!

Have a great day,

<3 Sabine

More BLINGnails

OPI ♥ TAG

Happy Sunday lovelies,

I hope you're all well! I am sitting here wrapped up in a blanket and sipping some hot tea while typing up this post. I caught a cold, probably got it from a co-worker who has been sick for a week. My immune system also might not be the best after these stressful weeks, but I hope it wins the battle against the invaders rather sooner than later. I just hate blowing my already sore nose all day and the tired and weak feeling that comes with colds.

Still I wanted to get this post up today, because the lovely Danny from Polish Chest has tagged me for the OPI ♥ tag a while ago already and I wanted to take part in this, because I just love OPI (how can you not?! :D).

So for the questions and my answers and some pretty bottle spam continue reading after the jump!