Boo!
Yay for Halloween! My absolute favourite celebration. I love all this spookiness, and the fun that comes with it. It's impossible to think of it without having a bit of a smile to yourself. And so many nailart ideas to play with of course. These days it's hard to come up with anything that hasn't been done before, and last year I stressed myself out trying to do so. I did come up with my favourite nailart ever last year though, and will post a picture further down this post. If you can't wait, the link is (here)
So anyway, as I was saying, this year I decided I'd pick a tutorial and give it a try. I'm terrible when it comes to looking at other peoples stuff, and only usually look at things that pop up in my Twitter feed or YouTube subscriptions, so it was nice to make an effort to go out and see what everyone's got on their nails this season.
Alot of it was too cutesy for me, because as far as I'm concerned, it should at least be a bit spooky! So I decided after looking at hours of tutorials, to give this VIDEO a try by Gorgeous Nails.
And here's the result:
Now, typically for me, there are some elements of this that I'm not 100% happy with. I wish I hadn't made the two crosses on the middle nails lean the same way, and I would have been a bit happier with the bat on my index finger if I'd worked on it a bit more. However, the tree on my little finger is only there because I made a massive blob on my nail accidentally, and that came out alot better than I would have thought, so a good save there for me.
I did this look by painting all my fingers with OPI's My Boyfriend Scales Walls, then using black acrylic paint and my spotter brush to draw in the details.
Here's another pic:
In real life this actually looks pretty good, and I'm thinking some kind of gradient behind it might make it really special. Very tempted to give it another go for the big day. Everything of course was topped off with a coat of Seche.
I've booked November 1st off as a holiday from work this year (yay!) so I can have a drink, a bit of a one-girl celebration with a bottle of red wine and some spooky movies. And lots of popcorn of course! My favourite is Metcalfes Skinny Sweet & Salt (link) which seems to be relatively guilt free and oh so yummy. Looking forward to it already! Not sure which films to watch yet though.
Here's one last pic of this years halloween manicure, in close-up:
And, as promised, here's a pic of last years nailart, inspired by the Blair Witch Project:
Interestingly and co-incidentally, my nails look to be almost exactly the same shape and length as they were last year! That's pretty weird considering they've been all sorts of lengths and shapes this year. This is probably my favourite nailart ever. Spooky-wooky.
Anyway, make sure you mosey on over and check out the scaaarrrryyyyyy offerings from the rest of the crew:
Catrine at Unnaked Nails (link)
Michelle at Labmuffin (link)
Maria at Maria's Nail Polish Blog (link)
Melanie at Nail and Polish (link)
Emily at An Accent Nail (link)
Ameerah at Valiantly Varnished (link)
Anna & Haylee at Makeup and Masala (link)
Rosemarie at Every Little Polish (link)
Anna at Makeup N More (link)
I'd love to know what your favourite halloween nail look is!
Until next time...
MASPOOASE x x x
~Wendy~
Hi there again everyone,
I hope you are well and have been enjoying your Sunday
So here I am, just back from my weeks holiday in Blackpool, all refreshed and rejuvenated! Or at least I was until my car started playing up again, gah! Anyway, while I was away, I happened to stumble into TX Maxx and have a bit of a browse. It was weird shopping for polish with other half there, I don't know why. I came away with a few collections, and this is one of them:
I've taken the clear plastic box off because it had the price ticket stuck over the polishes (as usual), also its worth noting this will be a picture heavy post, please let me know if it causes you problems and I'll make the pictures smaller.
I swatched them from lightest to darkest, so the first one I tried was the Pumpkin orange:
A strange formulation this, a bit watery but fast drying. First coat was very sheer. This is three coats and as you can see there is still a bit of VNL there. It gets darker the dryer it is. As for the scent, I found it a bit soapy, definitely not a pumpkin scent. It was also repelled by any oil at all on my nail, it literally ran away from it. I found it super tough to remove, I had to use the strongest acetone remover I had and even then I had to work at it.
Here it is with the glitter coat that came in the collection:
I struggled to get the glitter out of the bottle, this is a thick coat, and it was gloopy to start with. It definitely didn't smell of vanilla, it just had the same soapy smell as the orange one.
The next one I swatched was green apple:
And here it is with the glitter topcoat:
It was the same semi-sheer fast drying soapy smelling hard to remove formula as I'm sure you can tell. Next up I swatched the red one, for some reason called Cotton Candy:
From the first sweep of the brush with this one I said wow! It's coming off a little too tomato-y in this pic because it was a truer red than it shows here. It was opaque in one coat, but I did two and it's pretty much perfect coverage. Here it is with the glitter coat:
I put a coat of Barry M Red Glitter on my little finger just to see what it looked like, and I liked it better than this silver stuff.
Next up I tried the Grape, I had trepidation, would I get the lovely red formula or the sheer orange formula?
It was the sheer - boooo
This is 3 coats and I suppose you could almost get away with it, it dried so much darker than the colour in the bottle though:
And here it is with the glitter coat:
I put a coat of Max Factor Fantasy Fire on my little finger, just because the purple reminded me so much of the base colour of that polish and it makes the shimmer show well I think.
Well, by this time I only had one left to swatch, and let me tell you I was glad, because that soapy smell was really starting to give me a headache! Plus I was having to use so much polish remover to get it off so that wasn't helping either. So here we go with the Licorice black one:
Hooray it's back to the lovely formula the red one had! This is one coat, and I had no inclination to do another. It dried with a slight misty haze. Here it is with the glitter:
This one did actually smell a bit licorice-y!
So there we have it, all in all a bit hit and miss. I wish as much care and attention had been taken with the formulations as it was the packaging. The red and black were fine, but the others were a let down, just too sheer for me. And SO hard to remove! They'll maybe come in handy for some nail art, but at the grand old price of £4.99 for the whole collection I'm not too gutted.
I hope you've found my review helpful, and until next time...
MASPOOASE x x x
~Wendy~
Hi everyone, hope you are well
I had a ping of inspiration today! I've still been enjoying my Collection 2000 All That Jazz nails which I blogged about yesterday, and was looking at them (as you do) and I had a really good idea for my halloween nails this year. I usually disappoint myself because I can never come up with an idea that either a) hasn't been done already, or b) is creepy enough. It's an amazing thing because pretty much the only films I watch are horror or sci-fi so you'd think I'd have loads of ideas!
So anyway, for some reason the silver grey of the polish reminded me of the Blair Witch project, and that's where I started. I checked about on google to see if it's already been done and I couldn't see it anywhere so hopefully I'm safe on that score. If not, and someone has already done them who didn't come up on my search, apologies.
Also I apologise in advance if these photos aren't the usual quality, but it's dark outside and I was DYING to show you. Tomorrow when it's daylight I'll take some more pictures and maybe replace these ones.
*EDIT* I've put the new pictures in as it's daylight now! Hope you like them
This is what I came up with:
Heres a pic outside in the daylight (yes I got carried away with the pics):
Heres the other hand, the trees didn't fare so well being drawn with my 'not so skilled' hand lol:
And heres what I used:
- For the base colour, Collection 2000 Hot Looks in All That Jazz
I sponged (yes sponged!) Maybelline Express finish in White Dream, both to represent moonlight coming through the trees, and to make my trees stand out better, it worked well I think
- White striping polish from Claires Accessories - it was NOT easy to draw a circle with it
- Black striping polish from Color Club that came in a collection
- Top coat of Seche Vite, I've thinned it down with some Seche Restore and it's less dentable now, which I'm glad about.
So there we have it, am really pleased with this, and I think I'll use the stick man as my avatar over halloween, he's super cool.
I hope you like it, let me know what you think! And oh, don't have nightmares :-)
Until next time.....
MASPOOASE x x x
~Wendy~
