When it comes to 31 different Halloween nail art designs, there's a fair bit of planning and strategizing involved to actually be able to get it done. One of the steps is going through the different subthemes that live within the overarching Halloween theme - like my personal favorite, Spiderwebs - and on that list is definitely skulls. I think I've done skulls pretty much every year that I've been doing Halloween nails and they're easily some of my favorite designs I've done, so course I was going to do a skulls mani this year. The trick, I think, is to change it up so that you're not doing the same thing every year - even if you, like me, are doing something similar. 

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The Color Club Halo Gems collection got a lot of play in last year's 12 Nails Of Halloween because they had just come out and I was OBSESSED, but I knew I was going to have to bust out at least a few of them this year as well because these super intense, rich holos are just perfect for this time of year. For this mani, I decided to do a three shade gradient that moves vertically across the nails. The rich primary blue, classic purple, and bright magenta shades work really well together for a sort of seamless blend across the nails. Because the magenta is my favorite of these shades, I wanted it to live at the center of my hand, so I did the gradient accordingly. I started with blue on my outer nails and magenta on the inner ones as the base color and then went in with two passes of sponging to get the desired blend and opacity. Honestly, using these polishes for a gradient is absolutely a no brainer - just so, so easy!

For the skulls this time around, I wanted to add some contrast and pop to the overall look, so I decided to add some reverse stamping in a very pale purple linear holo to a couple of skulls per nail to really add some punch to the overall look. I picked up the image from BeautyBigBang04, a bit of a long time must have for me, and then used a dotting tool to fill in a couple of random skulls on the image. I tried to be thoughtful about which skulls to fill in so that I didn't get the same look on every nail, though my success on that front was a little bit thwarted by the fact that there is one skull in this image that clearly screams to be the one filled in.

I waited for the fill to dry down so that it was dry to the touch but still flexible and then applied a thin layer of sticky base coat to the nails, giving it about a minute to get tacky before transferring the image. I used a cuticle tool as well as a clean up brush to get rid of any excess and crisp up the edges. Once I was happy with the design, I applied a water based top coat to seal it in and then followed with a quick dry glossy top coat to really pop the design and add some volume. And voila!

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Admittedly, I didn't remember that I did something really, really similar to this mani last year, but I do really think that adding those reverse stamped, high contrast skulls throughout the design really does make it stand separate from the very similar one. Also, why not do repeats? There are some designs, a handful really, that I always want to recreate some version of every year and I don't think that's a bad thing at all, especially with a little bit of editing to make it stand out.

I'll be posting different Halloween nail art every day in October, so be sure to come back to check out more and head over to @pblnails and follow me there to stay up to date on all of my nail art along with video tutorials for all of my designs!

Thanks for reading!