Sweet Baby Octopolish!

My first Halloween look this year ended up being my fave, because I loooooove glow in the dark polish, so for my last look I felt like coming back to that. indoor, CF lighting I've started here with a base of Dance Legend Price of Beauty , a pretty color that sits on the cusp of blue and silver, packed with iridescent microflakie shimmer and a really nice blue glow in the dark effect.  Unfortunately, it'd thickened up a lot in the years since I've used it last, and with a good squirt of thinner was back to good as new... but I must have overdone it because 100% of the flakes & GITD powder settled to the bottom of the bottle 2 days later, whoops! I've rolled the dice plenty of times on cheapo chinese-made stamping plates off ebay, and sometimes you get what you pay for but sometimes things work out great.  KADS plates are absolutely stellar about 80% of the time, so for about $2 it's well worth that roll.  Nature 032 was a big win for me, and I've used the p...

 Femme Fatale's September color of the month was named Pumpkin Patch, and if that's not demanding to be used in a Halloween mani, I don't know what is.  indoor, CF lighting I've recently seen a couple of utterly adorable layered plates for Halloween that included jack-o-lantern images, and the one I ended up with is Born Pretty Halloween L004.   The central row of images on this "spoopy cute" plate are various jack-o-lantern faces that could be used easily by themselves in black over an orange mani.  The image on the far left of this row is a perfectly sized pumpkin - my nails are by no means huge, but this fits great - and the far right is an outline for the same pumpkin.  The base image is large and unidirectional enough that I had no major struggles lining things up to place them, even more so considering that the orange polish I used isn't opaque enough solo, so needed 2 layers stamped. indoor, CF lighting My other hand had 2 totally different jack...

 A recent arrival to my stash was sitting on the desk ready to be filed away, but was so obviously perfect for Halloween that instead it got used right away. indoor, CF lighting Spiders and spiderwebs are one of my most favorite halloween designs.  Spooky + anything from the animal kingdom = winning, and all that layered over what's clearly the perfect Halloween season color for me just can't be beat.  Lina Spooklicious 01 was still out after providing images for my last mani, and the spiderwebs and spiders on it meant round 2 with this plate was an easy pick.  Webs are in MoYou London Mercury (chrome polishes are such a PITA but so worth it), and the spiders in El Corazon True Red. indoor, bright CF lighting The base for this look is 2 smooth coats of  OPI Black to Reality - I am clearly a sucker for exactly this shade of black-red, since it's about identical to China Glaze X, Trust Fund Just Call My Lawyer , and Vapid Ruffian - they're each close enough t...

 Zombies aren't my usual jam, but looking around the pile of plates here, I noticed a whole bunch of really fun images of brains... indoor, CF lighting for both pics These brain images called for a base of grey matter, so I've started with a grey crelly flakie.  My zombie and all his hoped for snacks are from Lina Spooklicious 01 in Emily de Molly pink and trusty NanaCoco Love Black. ~Michelle

 I'm on a Baroness X roll here, so the next Halloween look just kept it coming. indoor, CF lighting My base here is Baroness X Gargantua, another stunner from the 2017 Shift in Space-Time collection.  Originally, I'd stamped this image in orange, but that polish was far too sheer and these skulls from XXL-3 just didn't pop.  I re-did the same look with Esmaltes da Kelly Carmelo and perfecto. indoor, bright CF lighting Gargantua is a deep amethyst purple jelly with a light scattering of very fine holo dust and a generous helping of opaque metallic copper shimmer. indoor, bright CF lighting The formula is very sheer to allow the sparkling elements to shine through effortlessly, so it takes a good 3 coats to deepen the color to what's seen in the bottle.  The copper is heavy enough in the jelly formula to completely settle out on the bottom of the bottle; serious shaking is necessary to get it re-suspended and ready to go.  The final look is so worth it, though. in...

Halloween is obviously going to be as non-standard as everything else this year, but one thing that absolutely does not need to change is All Halloween All Month On My Nails! indoor, CF lighting First up, one gorgeous Baroness X certainly deserved another, and wow does her glow in the dark topper Bio-exorcist glow .  I've started with 2 coats of Bees Knees A Mantis Shrimp's Favorite Color topped by a single medium thickness layer of Bio-exorcist.  The Ouija board designs in black are from MoYou London Typography 10 and Halloween 01. This stuff glowed for a solid 7 hours with only a brief charge from regular CFL bulbs - no crazy UV light or really intense charging needed to be awesome any time I woke up in the middle of the night, a real 5 star topper. Hope your Halloween month is as fun as you can make it, ~Michelle