Sweet Baby Octopolish!

Wet N Wild Morbid was indeed just the perfect base for a nail art look inspired by a glow-in-the-dark look I saw on one of my FB stamping groups. indoor, CF lighting On top of Morbid, I've stamped in classic black and white, but over all white elements here I've layered another stamp with Clear Jelly Stamper's glow-in-the-dark stamping polish.  It's thick and concentrated and was just barely textured enough that I could see it to line it up over the underlying white base. in the dark, obvi And heck yes does it glow like crazy!  I'd originally done only the skeletons in GITD, but the man said that the spiderwebs needed to match, and he was of course right.  I was really impressed that I was able to line up the glow over the white for those fine-lined little shapes! indoor, bright CF lighting again Skeleton & skull images are from Clear Jelly Stamper Coffee Scrubs & Rubber Gloves (because medical accuracy in your spooky is A+), spiderwebs from CJS Haunted Man...

Alrighty y'all, it's time for ALL HALLOWEEN ALL MONTH WOOOOOOOOOO First up, I'm going to start with probably the most Halloween-y named polish in my stash, Wet N Wild Morbid. indoor, CF lighting Morbid is absolutely perfectly named - it's the color scheme for every movie poster about vampires and werewolves going bump in the night, where it's not just black & white, it's murky teal and dirty charcoal. ya know what I mean? And this polish is only a hair older than that movie poster color scheme, being released as part of the "craze" line in ~2009.   bright afternoon daylight Morbid is an off-black base, slightly brownish-tinted and not a true neutral charcoal, giving it a "dirty" grungy look.  It's jam-packed with a borderline metallic deep teal shimmer that's fairly subtle in low light but blazes beautifully in brighter lighting. outdoor, bright direct daylight The brush and bottle are kinda weird to work with, since the bottle ca...

There's a few polish makers experimenting with metallic flakes mixed into colors, and a recent swatch pic of something lovely by Wing Dust made me contemplate a layering experiment.  I started with China Glaze Immortal: indoor CF lighting Immortal is a medium dark grey with lots of cool-toned shimmer.  It's close to opaque in one coat, but needed a touch-up for thin spots here and there.  It's a nice formula - this pic has no cleanup done.  To top it, I added one thick coat of Wet N Wild Gray's Anatomy, then one of OPI Pure. Gray's is a known dupe and far cheaper alternative to Deborah Lippmann's Wicked Game.  It's a  very  sheer oil-slick purple to green duochrome in a silvery base.  Plenty of people have layered it over black in their swatches, and you can get more intense color shifts that way, but I really prefer the softer look of what's in the bottle.  Immortal was a very close match for undies, so didn't alter the base color...

I've never done holiday nail art before, but  this super easy tutorial on a braided nail look  inspired me to make a red-white-and-blue accent nail, and the rest all came together. My thumb and pinky have a England's Perceval, my index and ring are Wet n Wild's Root of All Evil (best $2 ever, i'm starting to think), and my middle finger is braided stripes of each of those two plus an ancient Jane polish (remember Jane cosmetics?) called You're Smokin'. Over the blue, I've individually placed holographic stars out of a mini from Claire's that's equally old as that Jane polish - somewhere between 15 and 20 years old, actually.  While other cosmetics crash and burn after a few years, nail polish fo-evah! I like the braided accent nail a whole lot, and it's absolutely as easy as that tutorial makes it out to be.  I've never done this before, and I think it looks just as good on my right as my left hand, so that means anyone can do ...

Last night I decided to switch out the  poison green  for a true green, and end up with something more conventionally holiday festive. I busted out the Wet n Wild SaGreena the Teenage Witch that I'd bought over a year ago when I first started going polish-crazy, along with OPI's Fresh Frog of Bel Air that Suzy had given me (she knows my green love all too well) when she was making her picks from that OPI Muppet collection. In the bottle, SaGreena (the way they try and cram TV show names in there cracks me up a lot) is a nearly perfect, glowy, rich emerald.  The first watery, thin, streaky, sheer coat, though, reminded me of the difference between budget stuff and the high-end indies I've been hoarding more recently.  And yet, POW!  By the time i got back to my first nail, the thinness meant it had flawlessly self-leveled, erasing every single brush stroke, creating a thin wash of very smooth color.  Huh.  I guess you just have to be careful to not...