Sweet Baby Octopolish!

And as soon as book club was over, back to Halloween designs! indoor, office fluorescent lighting for all photos Continuing my master plan to make all my Halloween looks as different as possible, this round is a skittlette in different colors.  I bought an orange crème polish this year (gasp!) specifically for in case of nail art, and so Turkish import Flormar makes its debut here with the super bright Salmon Sashimi on my pinky (absolutely not salmon colored, very definitively ORANGE).  The pistachio green of Damone Roberts 1968 comes next, then China Glaze Creative Fantasy (over a layer of Cult Casual Elegance to help with opacity for this notoriously streaky jelly).  Skeletons and spiderwebs are my 2 fave Halloween themes, so I had plenty of plates to pick from to end up with this unified theme.  The super tiny dancing skeletons on my pointer and middle fingers are from Dixie Plates 2017 Halloween plate, the single arms-up skeleton is from BM-413, and t...

I've been having loads of fun lately coming up with themed designs for book club meetings, especially when selections have been so full of iconic and momentous images to pick from.  This week's book club was one I got to pick (squeee!!), Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind. outdoor, overcast daylight for both This book had plenty of moments that could be used to inspire some fun stamping.  I started with the same Cirque Ultrasonic + newsprint applied with alcohol as with a previous book club man i, then stamped flames from KN-04 in red and yellow to be the burning pages of a book. The smoky grey of Native War Paints Jessica that had worked so well with my last Halloween look was sitting right there pointing out how ideally it went with the theme, so accent nails were done in this color and stamped with key objects from the plot:  a goat skull from BM-S245 for the devil, a white coffin from BM-402, a broken heart from UC6-03, and a key from UC6-02. This...

Still plenty of time to fit in more Halloween manis all week! outdoor, overcast daylight I wanted to go in a completely different direction from my former Halloween look, so went with a monochromatic grey color scheme.  The base here is Native War Paints Jessica, which like most NWP I have shows some pretty serious UBS and pigment settling, but shook right up with no trouble and was a smooth almost one-coater.  This stone grey has a warm coppery red contrasting shimmer, so I took my color scheme for the rest of the mani from that.  Splatter images are from Dixie Plates Halloween 2017 stamped with El Corazon Kaleidoscope white and true red, and my trusty NanaCoco Love Black.  The cheeky ghost from MoYou London Geek 13 (who obviously has made all this mess) is reverse-stamped in the same colors. indoor, CF lighting As with all my MYL plates, I had zero issues lifting this image on the first try.  The cartoony, thickly lined images on this plate are ide...

While All Halloween All Month didn't work out this year (hey, sometimes life refuses to let you participate in fun stuff), I think I can work in at least a few holiday looks in the next week or so! indoor, bright CF lighting for both Last time I wore Baroness X Ghastly  (2 years ago, and this thermal is going strong!), the barely grey tint of the completely warm state didn't work so much for my skin tone, though I loved the shimmers and thermal shift.  This year, I layered 1 thick coat of Ghastly on top of 1.5 coats Sinful Colors Peppered Amazon, a medium kelly green polish.  My pics here show mostly the warm state with just a suggestion of the cooler midnight green on my tips, but IRL this was more dramatic.  The jack o'lantern design on my accent nail is from XXL-03, stamped in El Corazon Kaleidoscope Copper Flame. Happy Halloween! ~Michelle

Every so often when I'm pondering what to wear next, something sitting on the mani table, not yet filed in the drawer/shelf it's going to be stashed in, sparkles at me so insistently that it jumps the long line of untrieds and goes right on my nails.  It doesn't hurt that a black mani is getting a jump start on Halloween themed nails, so... indoor, bright CF lighting Femme Fatale released Circle Around the Moon as part of their Practical Magic collection just a couple of months ago.  I think the mood board posted for this collection was more from the movie version, but the book is an absolute MUST read. outdoor, angled afternoon daylight Circle around the Moon is a clear-based topper filled with silver holographic glitters in a wide assortment of flavors - there's stars, bars, squares, and a couple sizes of hexes, as well as teeny holo flakes.  indoor, window-filtered daylight Additionally, there's a generous helping of red-to-green aurora shimmer ...

This year has been incredibly tough, for a whole lot of reasons.  I'm really hoping that the worst is past now, but I was feeling beyond burnt out of life and work and pretty much everything.  When my younger sister suggested we all run away to Mexico to the same resort we'd loved last year, there was only one reasonable answer:  BOOK IT. outdoor, shaded bright sunlight for both I made a conscious effort for my vacation to be fully unplugged - I was mostly off facebook, I left my work phone at home, and I didn't get many pics of my nails, though i absolutely loved them.  One great Tonic prototype from the recent sale most certainly deserved another, so I put on two coats of one labeled in sharpie as 281*, a gorgeously metallic rose gold foil with just a pinch of scattered holo.  I had a super fun new dress and bathing suit in animal print, so used the snakeskin image from Creative Shop 16 in basic black.  I got tons of compliments on my snazzy mani an...