52 week nail art challenge 43: Halloween

Hi everyone!

This week's theme is Halloween. I know a lot of people are looking forward to this holiday, decorate their house weeks in advance, cook enough to feed a football team... but over here (the Netherlands) Halloween is something that is only seen online with influencers, in magazines that show insta-ready interiors and in stores that hope to get a boost in sales. So to say I'm not really feeling Halloween is putting it mildly. And waking up to no less than three broken nails (and I still don't know what I did to accomplish that) didn't help much either 😢 In the end I decided to just slap on a pretty color, combine it with black (THE color for the theme of course) and see where that would take me. This is the result:

I started out by painting all nails but my pinky with two coats of Polished for Days Ruska, a brownish crelly base with lots of orange-pink-yellow flakies that looks so beautiful! I actually felt a bit bad to use it in a manicure I was convinced wouldn't last for a day. My pinky was done one coat of a plain, black creme: Catrice ICONails Black to the Roots.

As Black to the Roots is very opaque, I also used it for the decorations I had in mind by now. I first grabbed a small piece of sponge and mangled it using tweezers by plucking out some small bits to make sure it wasn't straight anymore. I used that to create a vertical gradient with a bit of a frazzled edge on my ring finger. I then sponged a few flakies from Ruska over that to hide the edge a bit more. I finished by stamping bats from B. loves plates B.09 Spooky Halloween using Black to the Roots on my middle and ring finger. An isolated bat found its place on my index.

As I love mattified flakies, I decided to paint a coat of KIKO Matte Effect topcoat on top of all nails after I had sealed everything with a coat of Seche Vite, and decided my nails were as good as they were going to get.

The polishes I used:

Polished for Days Ruska, Catrice ICONails Black to the Roots

I won't lie and say I love these nails as I really don't. But surprisingly I don't hate them either. I love Ruska so I guess that saved this manicure for me, even though I don't care much for the bats 😉 Do you celebrate Halloween? And if you do, how do you celebrate it?