THIS POST IS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PUEEN COSMETICS.    

For my base, I started by applying one shade of an almost white pastel blue shade to all of my nails. This is really just to give something for the smoosh to stick to and a base that will allow those neon colors to really shine. Next, I decided on the polishes for the smoosh itself. I knew I wanted very much to stay in the cool toned neons to bring a sort of loosey goosey galaxy sky sort of feel, so I grabbed for a cool toned pink, a deep purple, a really true ultramarine blue, and then as a sort of contrast curveball I went for a teal as well. 

I wanted a lot of movement and marbling through this one, but I also wanted to keep it super soft, so when applying the dots of polish to the stamper I kept the dots quite small and tried to intersperse them quite a bit, but I also made sure that I had quite a bit of polish on the stamper to ensure that smooth marbling. And then I just pounced the stamper onto the nail until I had the desired look. (Also, if you're going to recreate this or even just do any smoosh, a cuticle barrier is definitely going to be your best friend so be sure to apply one of those before anything else.)

Next for the stamping. I considered just straight up applying the stamping image to the nail and I think it would have ended up looking really good, but I ultimately decided that I wanted to pop the stars with a little bit of reverse stamping. I decided to go for a really shimmery holo in a very, very pale pink shade to fill in the stars and I used a dotting tool to just quickly fill them right on the stamper head. Once they were ready to transfer, I started by applying a thin layer of sticky base coat to the nail and gave it about a minute to dry down until it was tacky and then I transferred the image straight onto the nail. Be sure that your smoosh base is pretty much fully dry before you do this because if it moves, it'll move your stamping and it'll be a pretty big mess... Things I have definitely learned from experience.

Once I was happy with my design and had removed the latex and tidied up my edges, I sealed everything in with a nail art top coat. Finally, to add volume and shine, I finished with a generous layer of glossy top coat and voila!

I have to say, this is one of those mani's that doesn't necessarily scream Halloween - it's really just those bats mixed in with the stars and moons that brings the Halloween vibe - and could be one that you could wear pretty much anytime. But also... there's just something so spooky season about this pairing, in my opinion anyway.

If you're interested in trying out any of the Pueen products that I used to put together this mani, they're all available through Amazon and every one of them definitely gets my stamp of approval.

Be sure to head over to @pblnails on Instagram to check out a video tutorial for this mani and be sure to follow me there to stay up to date on all of my nail art designs. I will be continuing to post Halloween themed mani's every day in October so be sure to check back!

Thanks for reading!