THIS POST IS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PUEEN COSMETICS.

As the days continue to get shorter and the weather colder, I am definitely feeling the weight of winter and I'd say it has me leaning a little bit more towards vampier nail art designs than I usually do. Weird, vampy designs are very much to my taste, but I actually don't do them a lot here on the blog because I don't love the way they photograph. I suspect it's that the paleness of my skin - seriously, I'm straight pasty, my friends - and I just tend not to like the results. That said, sometimes I just have to lean all the way in on the deep and vampy. 

Keep reading for more!

I've had my eye on this stamping image from the Pueen 114 Stamping Plate for a while now and I decided for this mani that I wanted to finally use it. Ultimately, I came up with the plan for the actual nail art - layering this leafy image in two different stamping polishes - long before I settled on this vampy color palette. It was actually this purple leaning gunmetal stamping polish, which just really felt like the right move for this mani, that had me reaching for this really deep, vampy base polish. This really deep blacked plum with the addition of some shifty shimmer and holo, just felt like it would bring that richness that would really compliment the stamping. 

Now, it's almost impossible to actually see in the finished product, but I did actually layer my stamping on this one. I started by applying this stamping image in black to all of my nails, even though it did pretty much become immediately clear that it wasn't really going to show up, though I do think it adds a subtle something to that background. Next, I went in with the same image in the gunmetal polish shade and played around with the placement to ensure that each nail was just a little different than the rest - this image is really great for that because it's quite large and almost triangular, which allows for a lot of wiggle room on placement.

Once I was happy with my stamping, I sealed everything in with a nail art top coat and then followed with a matte top coat because I felt like taking down the shine would help to crisp up the details. In the end, I do think that I should maybe have gone with a glossy finish for this, but I still like how it turned out. So, voila!

I've gotta say, I wasn't entirely sure how I felt about this mani when I first finished and there are definitely some aspects that I probably would change if I were to recreate it, but I do love the vampiness for this time of year and I think the lean to purple works really well. 

If you're interested in trying out any of the Pueen products featured in this post, they're all available on Amazon and I continue to be really impressed with the performance of all of the Pueen products that I've tried thus far.

Thanks for reading!