Vampire Ball

In some ways you could say that today’s look is the last Valentine’s Day nail art I truly painted for February. It’s very close to being a completely pink monochrome. It’s about a ball so that’s pretty romantic. It has a floral background and sexy people on it. Very fair. It’s also Halloween-esque because vampires. But let’s face it, we have Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We have True Blood. We have Vampire Diaries. Vampires are a year-round thing and I know balls get scheduled throughout the year, even though I’m not invited. So let’s just agree that the right person could enjoy this vampire nail art all year.

But also I’m just a little 24/7 Halloween. Which is probably why I’m wearing glow in the dark ghost socks right now. 🤣

Nail art products used

Base Polishes:

Hit the Bottle’s “B-A-B-Y, Baby” and Maniology’s “Fae“

Stamping Polishes:

Hit the Bottle’s “B-A-B-Y, Baby” + “Out Damn Spot“ and Maniology’s “Fae“

Reverse Stamping Polishes:

Covergirl’s “dark metallic gray“, Familiar Polish’s “Fog“, Hit the Bottle’s “B-A-B-Y, Baby“, Maniology’s “Fae“, Sinful Colors’ “Snow Me White“, and Zoya’s “Enza“

Stamping Plates:

Hit the Bottle “Embrace the Darkside 02” (background rose pattern)

Maniology “M412“ (crystal ball, bat wing stand, rose flourish)

Moyou London “Universal Studio Monsters Collection-04“ (dracula/vampire, “a nightmare of horror!”)

Moyou London “Halloween Collection-17“ (lady in sexy bat wing costume)

Items in italics are debuting on the blog for the first time.

One of the things I’ve been raring to paint is a mani where the nails have two different colors and the same stamping pattern and you just flip them. So light pattern on dark; dark pattern on light. The hard part is that most polishes will look different when stamped on light or dark colors because they are not fully opaque. You can sometimes find a stamping plate with two versions of the same image and one is the inverse of the other so you only need to use one polish to stamp, but that is very rare. And you can still run into the problem that I did where the inverse image has very big areas where the polish needs to pick up perfectly and you are struggling. So I ended up not even using the inverse image for the rose pattern and just swapped which polish was the base.

But if you peeled back all the layers of polish and stamping on this mani, you would find the bottom layer is a different color and one nail even has that different base polish and a stamped pattern that doesn’t even show up on it b/c there isn’t enough contrast. Why, yes, I did fumble my way to success here. Sometimes testing out what you’re planning is the smart thing to do and I don’t do it. LOL

But I love how this turned out and I’m just bummed my laziness about adding nail polish thinner to my smudge free top coat resulted in a lot of unwanted bubbles. I edited out some, but not all. It’s…pretty bad. 😬

@HalloweenForeverCollab – Vampire Masquerade Ball

I didn’t really lean into the “masquerade” part since I posted a Mardi Gras mani a few weeks ago, but you can see a lot of gorgeous masks in the collage.

Instagram is giving me a lot of grief about tagging people in my comments so I’m kinda back to square one on helping y’all find the participants. Linking to accounts still means you’d have to scroll if you came to this post later. The best way would be to basically stalk their accounts and link each post directly, but that is a lot of extra work that I don’t have the time/energy for. Especially since life can happen sometimes and a participant could end up posting their design months later. Sadly, I am probably just going to wave the flag of surrender here. 😕

• Instagram Group: @HalloweenForeverCollab
• Collab Hosts: Grace @viperlovr and Chelsea @semplynailingit
• Next Prompt: Irish Halloween Traditions

Final vampire nail art photos

Until next time, friends! 🙋‍♀️