Halloween Dot Mani

This Halloween Dot Mani was inspired (thieved!) from Kayla Shevonne's blog.   Hers looks much neater than mine, but she is a true nail artist and I'm just a mere amateur and copy cat.

For this mani I whipped out my dotting tools and used the following colors:

• Black base:  Essence Black is back
• Orange: Pure Ice Hot Tamale
• White: Ulta Snow White
• Purple: American Apparel African Violet
• Green: Blush  no name 

Topped with a coat of SV and there you go.  

Happy Halloween!!

Loreal's - The Muse's Inspiration + Halloween Mani/Revlon Stencils

Loreal has really stepped up their game in the last year, releasing really nice polishes that are finally starting to catch my eye.  Today I have a polish from the Project Runway collection called The Muse's Inspiration.  I bought another 2 from the line, but have yet to swatch them.  Hopefully I'll get to them soon.

So here's The Muse's Inspiration.  It's a shimmery tangerine orange like color like no other I have in my stash.  It really is a rich color -perfect for autumn and the application was very smooth.  This is 3 coats of The Muse's Inspiration on top of a base coat of Bonder and then I topped with SV.   Think tangerine when you look at this pics because, as usual, my camera was confused by this color. 

Side note: please excuse my right hand, it's not as nice as my left. :o/

 Now for a Halloween mani!  I found these Revlon Nail Stencils at Walgreens for around 3-4 bucks and thought I should give them a chance.

I used Essence Black is Back for the stencil color.  Let it dry completely (or at least what I thought was completely) and then carefully peeled off the stencil.  This is the result:

Pretty cool, huh.  Now they're not perfect, by any means, but they did the trick.  I think one would achieve a neater, more crisp result with a stamping plate than with this, but if you don't want to spend the money on a stamping kit and plates then this is a nice little shortcut. The only catch is that they really don't seem to be reusable as then bend out of shape when you pull them off.   I'll be using the mustache stencil for a Movember manicure next month.  Can't wait.

What do you think?  Would you give the Revlon nail stencil a try?

Until next time!  ☺

Candy Corn Mani for Halloween

So I'm a day late, but I say better late than never.  I wore this manicure Sunday and Monday for Halloween.  I must say it's one of those manicures that you want to look at in a Monet-like fashion...which is from far away.  Because up close, it's kind of messy looking, but it was my first try, so I think I get a pass.  Here we go!

You will need a white polish, yellow and an orange polish.  The more saturated and more opaque the polish, the better. 

The first step is to cover the nail with the white polish and let dry thoroughly.

Then, you paint the nail with the yellow polish starting from about 1/4 of the way up or so from the cuticle, covering the white completely.  You may need two coats and it doesn't have to be perfect.  Again, let dry.

Finally, paint a stripe of the orange polish starting at the lower edge of the yellow- where the white and orange meet, taking up the center third of the nail, more or less.  I had to paint perpendicularly against the nail with a super steady hand in order to the get the stripe to be as even as possible and I didn't sweat it when it got on my skin.  On my mani, I had to use several coats of the orange in order to even things out and in order to reach maximum opacity on top of that yellow. 

After all coats are nice and dry, top it off with some SV for super shiny results and then clean up those edges and cuticles and you're done. 

Here are the polishes I used for this manicure.  Sinful Colors are usually available at Walgreens and Target.  I found mine at Walgreen's for $1.99 a piece and the Sally Hansen orange was also purchased at Walgreen's for not much more. 

I can't wait to try something new next year.  :)