Milani Jewel FX Gold over China Glaze Glittering Garland

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday weekend.  As for me, I tried to keep things quiet this year.  We decided not to travel and we spent quality family time together.  This past year has been especially hectic and a bit challenging for us.  There were a lot of changes that took place, so we all had to do some adjusting.  I felt we all needed a break and kept thing simple, so I made this year's Christmas, our official pajama day.

My mani for Christmas started out with China Glaze Glittering Garland from this year's 2011 holiday collection called Let It Snow.  Originally I was going to pass on this collection, but that completely changed once I saw the colors being posted all over the blogs, especially Glittering Garland.  I caved and I'm really glad I did.  Glittering Garland is a stunning evergreen jelly base filled with little green glass-like shimmer running through it.  It's got a lot of depth, and I love how the shimmer flashes a bit of gold.  I don't own anything like this.  Then, I wanted to "holiday" it up bit more and added a coat of Milani Jewel FX Gold, a chunky gold glitter with mirror-like finish.  This came out winter 2010, part of the Rockstar Heavy Glitter collection.

The result reminds me of a Christmas tree decorated with gold ornaments.  My pictures are really not doing the mani justice.  Or maybe I should have spent more time taking better picture.  The mani was really spectacular in person.  At first, I was really worried that adding the gold glitter was going to be over-kill, but I think it worked out beautifully.  I actually got a lot of compliments today from strangers while shopping with friends.  My 69 year-old mother even liked it.  Total shocker!  She must have really liked it because she picked-up the gold glitter and applied it to her own nails.  I never expected that to happen.  Oh, I have to say, one coat looked fab on her naked nails too.