You got to love the holiday! I do! That’s why I always go all out for some excellent Halloween decorations both in my apartment and of course, the nail! I’ve been doing Halloween nail themes for the past few years and every year I try to do a similar theme, but change it up slightly. There are so many options for this holiday, it’s usually difficult to choose where to focus, so instead of choosing, I do them all! haha

Clearly, I am not ambidextrous so I try to do the more complicated themes on my left hand (Frankenstein, eye ball, mummy etc.) and on my right I tend to do easier designs.

Left Hand: Eye ball, Spiderweb, Frankenstein, Mummy, and Jack-O-Lantern

Right Hand: Spooky eyes, Candy Corn, Spider, Dripping Blood, and Moonlit Night

Eye Ball: Paint your entire nail white. Let dry, then take a dotting tool and place a large dot in the middle of the nail (choosing a natural eye color; I chose blue to make the white and red pop). Allow to dry and while drying take a red and draw in little squiggly lines from the cuticle toward the blue. Place a smaller white dot in the blue so that the black dot shows.

Spider Web: Paint your entire nail a solid color, but one that shows well with a gray or silver on top. I love purple so that’s why I chose it. Then take a striping brush and start in one corner of the nail (bottom left or right) and draw out diagonal lines with gray or silver. Then take a small brush and draw connecting lines to each diagonal that are perpendicular to the diagonal. These lines should be straight but also form a half circle.

Frankenstein: Paint your whole nail a lime green flat color. Take a medium dotting tool and use black to form curly hair at the cuticle line. I then used a Sally Hansen black nail pen to do the fine detailing. Make eyes and nose. For the mouth I drew a straight line then placed hash marks on it to represent a sewed mouth.

Mummy: Paint your whole nail a light gray. Then with a striping brush, make arbitrary diagonals all over the nail to signify the wrappings of a mummy. Place a horizontal thick black line 1/3 up the nail from the cuticle. Place two white dots on this line for the eyes.

Jack-O-Lantern: Paint the entire nail a bright orange. Take Sally Hansen’s black nail pen and go in with triangle eyes and nose. For the mouth, make it as happy or fun as you want. I aimed for a traditional Jack-O-Lantern face for mine.

Spooky Eyes: The aim here is to make it look like there are eyes in the dark. So paint your nails a dark color (midnight blue, dark purple, even black) and then go in with a dotting tool with different, vibrant colors and dot in eyes. Some people can make cool expressions with the eyes. Seeing that this was my right hand, I couldn’t. 😦

Candy Corn: Paint 1/3 of your nail yellow, the next 1/3 orange, and the last 1/3 white. It’s best if you let the shades dry before you proceed to next color. Then go back in with a darker shade and outline the shape of the candy corn. This is the first year I did this, usually I just leave my nail the 3 colors. It looks really cool, but because when you start going over bright colors with a dark one. You can’t edit beyond this point!

Spider: For the base color(s) I painted my nail a gray and once that dried went back over with a shimmery purple to give a shine but some color for the spider to stand out. Then I took a dotting tool and made a large black dot in the center of the nail and from there I used Black Nail pen (Sally Hansen) to draw in 8 legs. Lastly, put in two little white dots for eyes.

Bloody Nail: I started with a flesh tone as the base (having to do multiple layers of this). Then I took a solid red and a dotting tool and made 3 dots at varying heights on the nail. I connected these dots to the tip of the nail and filled in the nail tip area with red.

Moonlit night: The base is a deep purple for this, and then I took a dotting tool and went back with a vibrant yellow (opaque yellow works the best). The top coat for this nail to give it the sparkle is a glow in the dark polish from Julep. It really does work and looks really cool, but you must shine a light on the nails beforehand in order to get the glowing.

 

I hope you all enjoyed, this was quite a bit of work to do, but oh so fun! Let me know if you have questions, comments, or suggestions as to how to do any other design!