WELL. Happy Halloween, everyone! Honestly, this month has gone both incredibly fast and also felt like a bit of a marathon. My brain and my nails both desperately need a break at this point, but I'm so thrilled with how this year's raft of Halloween nails went. I didn't do quite as many as last year since I took Sunday's off this year, but 26 Halloween themed nail designs is still a LOT. So this final one is a bit of a recreation, but I love this version of it and it feels sort of right to bookend my Halloween mani's with some recreations. 

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Sometimes I have an idea that I absolutely love in my head, but can't quite get the execution right. It has never been more true than with this design, which I did three distinctly different versions of before I got it right enough that I was willing to post it here on the blog. The first two times were hand painted, but they just... didn't get it done for me, so on the third I did a combination of hand painting and stamping and it came together much more to my personal taste. 

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I think sometimes, in my everything and the kitchen sink approach to nail art, I tend to forget how much value there can be in just keeping it simple. For today's Halloween nail design, I wanted to put together a mani that balanced simplicity with a visually interesting design - and I feel pretty good about it. It's very simple, but there's bats... so what more could a person need? 

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As soon as I saw this year's Uberchic Halloween plate - 09, if you're wondering! - I wanted to put together some version of today's mani. I love that they included both a full cover image featuring the vampire teeth as well as the single image. I absolutely love when plates do that because it really allows for a cohesive design without having to try and isolate a single image from the full cover image or just fully cover all of your nails. For me, versatility with plates is really important, so this is huge for me.

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I almost resisted this year, but in the end there was just no ignoring the call of an all over bat mani. I just really couldn't seem to help myself. "It's frickin' bats - I love Halloween!" You know? Anyway, as always, I tried to change up the base for the design a bit and I ended up using two different bat images for this design, which ends up being pretty subtle overall but really does, I think, add a bit of visual interest. 

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 THIS POST IS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PUEEN COSMETICS. 

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I feel like I can't let a Halloween season go by without doing some sort of spooky haunted house or graveyard silhouette nails - they're just such a staple! That said, I do like to change it up at least a bit every time so I'm not just throwing the same mani's out there every year. For this year's silhouette mani, I decided to go with a neon vertical gradient base, which I think is something I've never done before. And I think it turned out genuinely stunning!

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Like a great many people of my generation, I watch Scream and generally the entire original trilogy every Halloween season and I always feel inclined to do some Ghostface nails to go along with my mini marathon. I've done some hand painted ones once before (I will be the first to tell you that my hand painting skills are mid at best) but it was only this year that I finally got a stamping plate that featured a Ghostface image, so of course I had to do them. There was literally no choice. 

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Earlier this year, I did a mani featuring an orange gradient tip and even at the time I knew that I would be bringing back the look for a Halloween mani. I changed up a few things - obviously! - but there is definitely no denying where the inspiration came from. I really love designs that are sheer over the nail bed and then have an opaque gradient tip. Whether worn as is or paired with some stamping, I feel like it's super versatile and pretty much always looks great. 

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I definitely went into this year's marathon of Halloween nail art with very specific intentions of doing some more minimalist designs, since I have a tendency to go full on kitchen sink when I have a theme in front of me. For this mani, specifically, I kept it really, really simple with a simple créme + flakie topper base along with one stamping image repeated across the entire hand. And I LOVE IT. Seriously, this mani definitely reminded me just how much simple can work when done right. 

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 THIS POST IS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PUEEN COSMETICS.

When I was perusing the internet in search of inspiration for this year's Halloween nails, a style that really jumped out at me is what I like to call "blobby abstracts" with spooky Halloween stamping. As a big fan of some blobbiness, I knew that I had to put together my own version of this style and I knew just the plate I wanted to use to create it - the Pueen Halloween Party 01 Stamping Plate! 

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I haven't actually used many Clear Jelly Stamper plates up to this point, but if the experience of putting together today's mani is any indication I definitely think that I should be trying more. From the moment I saw this plate, I wanted to put together this mani and pretty much this mani exactly. I just loved the idea of the really spooky and creepy zombie silhouettes coming out of the darkness like something straight out of a horror movie. And with these layering images, it actually came together really quickly and easily. 

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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 am definitely someone who tends to revisit design styles that I've done before, though I do try to change things up at least a bit rather than just straight up recreating designs I've done in the past. One design that has become a sort of staple for me is the one I used for today's mani and it's one that I feel like I've done countless versions of over the past few years since the first time I did it. For today's mani I will admit that the changes are somewhat minimal, but I still absolutely love this mani!

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While I do try to be good and not order every single stamping plate I see - even with as much nail art as I do, I already have plates in my collection that I've never used so I hardly need more - sometimes there are plates that I just can't resist picking up. Recently, as I was perusing the stamping plates avaiable from Aliexpress, I saw this Halloween plate from Mr. Fox and I just had to have it, very specifically because I wanted to create this mani or some version of it. There's just something so adorable about these dancing skeletons!

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 THIS POST IS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PUEEN COSMETICS. 

It is my firmly held opinion that you just can't go wrong at Halloween with some really classic spiderwebs nails. I mean, honestly, they just get the job done. So for today's mani, I decided to pair some really heavy classic spiderweb stamping with an orange base polish for what I think is just the quintessential Halloween mani. 

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Today's mani is another one of those that was inspired for me by one that I saw on Pinterest. I would link to the artist directly, but even though there was a watermark I can't seem to find the original artist. Even though this is very, very much not a design that I would normally gravitate towards, I was so obsessed with the simplicity of it and how impactful it ended up being as a result that I had to put together my own version of it. I did bring it a bit of my own personal style to the design, as I always prefer to, but I think I stayed pretty true to the inspiration. 

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As I was looking through my stamping plates to come up with Halloween nail art ideas, I found myself particularly drawn to the Manitude x Pretty Creepy Stamping Plate. There's just something particularly enjoyable about the images on this plate and I feel like the possibilities for what you could create with it are sort of endless. I think, in the end, the inspiration for this came from the little bows with skulls at the center - it felt sort of playful, like a teenage goth romance, so that's the direction I took it in. Leaning into my early to mid 2000s emo girl hard.

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