Today's mani takes a significant amount of inspiration from a mani from @hannys_manis from last Halloween season and I just fell so completely in love with the design that I had to do my own spin on it for this year's Halloween season. I have to admit, I've done a lot less reverse stamping this year thamn I did last year because I have a tendency to convince myself it's going to take forever and be exhausting or something, but it really does almost always come together really smoothly. 

Without further ado, let's get into the nails!

I was really married to the idea of using this polish from OPI called Graffiti Sweetie during Halloween season this year, so I decided to use it for this mani. It's this really beautiful muted mauve shade that has a bit of an ashiness to it and it just felt like a really good fit for the spooky season. I applied two coats of Graffiti Sweetie and let those dry down. 

I decided sort of on the fly to add a flakie topper because I felt like it would just add a little bit of something that this mani needed since it was going to be both very simple and also very monochrome at the end of the day. I went in with one coat of Sally Hansen's Glazed Top Coat, which is an iridescent flakie topper that leans quite pink. 

For the stamping, I chose one main image for each nail and filled them in using a shimmery white polish and a black linear holo - although I will admit choosing a holo when I planned on mattifying the design was a bit silly. Once all of my decals were dry, I went one by one across my nails to stamp the design. I started by applying a layer of sticky base coat one nail at a time so that it wouldn't dry down too much while I worked. Once the base coat had dried enough that it was tacky, I applied the main image decal towards the center of the nail before adding botanical and star images to fill in the negative space. 

Once I was happy with my design, I sealed everyhing in with a nail art top coat before finishing with a matte top coat to bring down the shine and smooth everything out. And voila!

I must admit, I don't love this mani as much as I loved that inspiration mani, but I do think it turned out pretty cute at the end of the day. I definitely think this purple is a solid but not too on the nose shade for Halloween nails and I think it serves to be a great base. Overall - satisfied.