I have to admit... today's mani will inevitably be one of the most intense as far as work put in and, quite frankly, struggle that I'll have through this entire month long marathon of Halloween nails. I definitely had some issues with the stamping plate and also the amount of reverse stamping I did for this mani was... a lot. But I'm pretty happy with the overall result so all of the struggle and work was probably worth it. Maybe. I do love how it turned out in the end. 

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Honestly, as soon as I saw the MoYou London Universal Monsters collection, I fell in love with this plate and 100% wanted to do some version of this mani. In fact, this is one of the ones I was super excited to get on my nails. I decided to lean into the Frankenstein of it all with the color story and grabbed for two absolutely stunning polishes from Dimension Nails to serve as my base. Malachite Butterfly is this amazing acid green color that just screams Halloween green to me, and Lilac Banded Butterfly is a beautiful ashy lavender shade that is great for Halloween but also just a really great purple to have in your collection, in my opinion. 

For this mani, I alternated my base color based on how I was going to fill in the Frankenstein's Monster and Bride Of Frankenstein images and I applied two thin coats to each nail to serve as my base. 

Now, the stamping is where the issues came in for me. I have to say, I really, really struggled with getting a good pickup from this plate in a way I never had before and it actually makes me not want to recommend this even though the designs are fantastic. It was just really, really hard to get even a decent pickup and I actually tried several of my favorite stamping polishes with absolutely no success in pick up. That said, I did manage to do it and I filled in both the full coverage and the single character images using a combination of a dotting tool and a really tiny nail art brush in a color palette featuring the two base polishes along with a nearly white, a soft grey, a dark grey, and a sort of ashy pink. 

Once my decals were ready to transfer (dry to the touch but will still leave slight fingerprint indents with a slight pressure) I applied a thin layer of sticky base coat to the nails and let it dry down to tacky. For the character image nails, I started by applying some of the stitching images to the corners to sort of add some visual interest and then applied the single images towards the center of the nail while I applied the full cover images directly to the nail. 

Once I was happy with the design, I sealed it in with a nail art top coat and then added a glitter smoothing top coat to smooth out some of the lumps left behind by the reverse stamping. Finally, I finished with a matte top coat to bring down the shine and voila!

I have to admit that while I'm pretty happy with the end result of this one and I love that I was able to bring what was in my head to life, this one was a struggle for me and it's left a bit of an unfortunate taste in my mouth. I've actually never struggled as much with getting a decent pick up from a stamping plate as I did with this one and if it hadn't been for how much I loved the images on this plate I probably would have abandoned the idea all together. It worked out though. 

Be sure to head over to @pblnails on Instagram and follow me there to keep up with my Halloween nail art series every day in October and for video tutorials for all of the mani's I post here on the blog!

Thanks for reading!