Happy Halloween!

  Ahh yes, boys and ghouls, it's the most wonderful time of the year again!  I'm talking about Halloween...what did you think I meant?!  I can't get enough of kitschy decor, fake blood, and fun-sized candy bars!!

Such a shame I didn't get a proper shot of my lovely neck scar, which you can barely see here!

  OK first let me just talk about my costume makeup for just a second here.  I was really pleased with how this look turned out!  I wanted a green face without having to cover myself in greasy makeup, but I didn't want to end up with a bloodless zombie face, so powder was out!
  I have this epic palette of high-end grease paints from Make Up For Ever that I am absolutely obsessed with!  The green on my face is straight from the palette with no added tints.  The colors are rich and beautiful and I absolutely adore it, but caveat emptor: these paints are greasy as fuck.  Now, I'm an oily-faced lass to begin with, but these are pretty insanely slippery when you first put them on!  This means a few things, both good and bad.  Happily, this makes it insanely easy to apply and also to fix any mistakes once you've got it on your face.  Unfortunately, it also means you need to give it proper time to cook, girl.  Gotta let that shit just SIT THERE for a good hour before I feel confident.   
  Additionally, it pretty much requires a finishing powder, so you're stuck with a velvet finish whether you want it or not.  I use Swagger finishing powder, which I ALSO freaking love.  Now, I love MUFE, but their finishing powder is half the size and twice the price, and it is made of exactly the same thing!!  WHAT in the WHAT, girl!   Don't be dumb, comparison shop.  And support small business!  The whole Swagger line is handmade by the divine Blake Karamazov in San Francisco!  We will be revisiting her again soon, to be sure...
  The lips are Jamaica by Ka'Oir, which is pretty great, too.  It's pretty creamy, and suuuper pigmented, so you don't have to put a heaping ton on to turn normal-girl-colored lips green!  I'm not crazy about the way it smells, but it's a small quibble.  I mean, it's not like it stinks.  It's fairly long-lasting and comfortable to wear, so I would recommend it.  The brand has all the freaky colors you have been wanting but unable to find.
  The eyeliner is a cream liner by MUFE, which I used on my stitches as well.  This shit is the BOOOOOMB!!!  I will never use liquid liner again, I swear to you.  This stuff is the total opposite of the paint palette - it's super waxy and dries quickly!  It stays richly black and flexible all day, too - no crusty, flaky business.  PLUS it doesn't require a powder to stay in place. Hurrah! Well worth the price.  I love it so much I would marry it. 
  My skin has nothing but mineral powder and the soft, forgiving sheen of my webcam's meager flash.

 

Completing the look with a Bride of Frankenstein bouffant and some gangrenous sutures!

  Now I've been dying to try a little spooky dripping blood look on my nails, but red just wasn't gonna match my Frankenstein ensemble, so I went with neon orange and green spooky slime!  I love neons, but they are almost always a slightly translucent gel, which is not great for coverage over dark colors, and naturally I needed a black backdrop for my Nickelodeon-colored slime nails.  Solution?  Mix one drop of white polish to four or five drops of neon polish, and viola! You have opaque neons!  Sure, they end up being a slightly paler hue, but once you've got it on your hands, no one will be the wiser!

To paint the slime, I used a combination of a thin, stout nail brush, and a small dotting tool.  The dotting tool was great for applying even coverage and achieving the drips.  In fact, the dotting tool is the most useful for this look.  I highly recommend using something similar, but in a pinch, a nice toothpick or even a dry (and cleaned!) ball-point pen will do lovely!  Be sure to wipe the tip every couple of dots to keep your tool precise and your polish from getting gooey.

Pretty sure these pants are the backdrop to 50% of my photos...

Double Dots Day!

  Well, it's been a wacky couple of weeks since I last updated, and since I made sure to buy a round-trip ticket to Crazytown, I was happily able to come back!  I've since done quite a lot of "housekeeping" in my life, and now I think I'm ready to come back to getting my happy on about my nails.  And, and, aaaand!  I have some exciting new designs to share in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!  Not only that, but some hotly-anticipated mail will be arriving soon to my mailbox, and I'll finally have something other than manicures to share!!

  But enough chitty-chatty, let's get down to the business of polka-dots!  I adore polka-dotted nails, but I'm not keen on the stamper (I ordered some piece of shit version that doesn't work as well as my friend's "As Seen On TV" version - bah!) and dots are so hard to make with a brush!  Happily, whilst trolling Amazon I found a set of ball-point pens in various sizes, specifically for making dots and water marbling!  These little mofo's are a revelation, I tell you! 

  Let me warm you up by showing you how my stinky toes turned out!  I was attempting a comic-book gradient with a pepto-pink background (some new Revlon that I can't recall the name of) with white dots.  I used a few different sizes of the pointer tool to achieve a variety of sizes of dots - I tried to graduate the sizes to give the impression of a fade - to limited success, I think.  As always, the rest of my toenails get an abridged version of the design...they're just too small to give a shit about!

  Not quite finished with the comic-book theme, I decided to try out a little party-nail action on my fingers.  I used Sally Hansen's Smooth & Perfect in Dune as the base coat.  I have mentioned this color before, and I think I'm gaining more of an appreciation for it - it's nearly clear, and it works like a mineral powder - just makes my nails look like a more perfect version of their natural selves!  Also, it's not a pink-tinted sheer, which makes it unique!

 I've done a slightly-offset two-color diagonal grid pattern here.  The offsetting is what gives this look it's graphic, Lichtenstein-esque quality.

  Surprisingly, the higher contrast color combinations ended up looking a lot better - my favorite combo ended up being the orange/blue (left ring finger).  I had initially thought a more subtle blend would be the answer, but you can see on the yellow/green green/orange combination, that this was kind of a fail.  Perhaps a brighter background would have given the colors some pop, but you know how I feel about white nail polish....