31 October 2012

Werewolf Nails X 2!

I have a bonus post for you today! You get two manis in one.

For work today, my husband decided to dress up as a werewolf and have fun along with his clients. He really surprised me by asking if I would help paint his nails! Whoo-hoo! Here's what I came up with.


Pretty good, right?! I started with a base coat of Essie Brooch the Subject. Then I sponged on Sinful Colors Nirvana, OPI Suzi Loves Cowboys, Rimmel Black Satin, Zoya Dove, and Butter London Bumster. I also purposely added some polish to make it seem like he had been digging in the dirt.



Here he is in his whole costume. My husband has thick curly hair so I helped it out a bit with some gel. I also dirtied up his face, neck, and arms with black eyeshadow and drew on his his nose. I even made the shirt he's wearing!

And for werewolf nails part 2, you have my nails for today! I don't have a Halloween party to go to, and I'm pretty uncomfortably pregnant at this point so I won't be dressing up. But that doesn't mean my nails can't have fun like always!

I used Girly Bits Howl at the Moon for this mani. The base is a sort of dark blue/purple jelly base and then the glitter is large/medium/small gold hexes and gold micro glitter.  I chose to wear this on its own rather than layer it because I like the different depths of glitter you get. I used 3 coats for this mani.




30 October 2012

Guest Post at Elfster

Elfster loved the little blurb I typed about them not long ago, so they asked me to do a guest post for their blog on Halloween nail designs!  There are even two featured that I haven't shown on my blog previously.

Check out these brand new designs and the post here: http://www.elfster.com/blog/spooky-nails-to-celebrate-halloween/



27 October 2012

A-England Jane Eyre

Just a quick post for today.  For this mani, I used A-England Jane Eyre as my base coat. I used 2 coats, but you could get by with 1 thick coat.  As usual, this A-England polish applied wonderfully: good pigmentation, opaque in minimal coats, smooth, and not too thick or thin. On my accent finger, I applied a skull water decal.

Jane Eyre is part of A-England's Gothic Beauties collection. Most of them are black with a shimmer.  Jane Eyre has a purple shimmer to it that is most noticeable on my pinkie finger.  I have another Gothic Beauty that I'll show you later :)




25 October 2012

Bloody nails

I decided it would be kinda fun to do some bloody nails. I haven't tried the drip method before so this would be a good way to try that too.

I started with a base coats of China Glaze Kalahari Kiss.  I needed 2 coats.
For the knife, I used Sinful Colors Slate for the blade and an accent of Wet n Wild Metallica to add a bit of depth. The handle is done with Rimmel Black Satin.

For the blood, I missed Zoya Sooki with Zoya Isla to give a bit of depth. When I painted on the blood, I wasn't too worried about being precise either since blood dripping isn't going to be perfect (not that I would know! Lol!). I really like how the texture of the blood turned out.

I love this mani! It's super perfect for Halloween. The cashier at McDonalds even noticed and said they were pretty o.O




22 October 2012

Hits Glitter Forte 389 Brown

This awesome polish is another gift from my awesome Halloween swap. Hits Glitter Forte 389 (no name that I could find) is a beautiful brown/copper glitter in a sheer brown base. I love the Hits polishes, but since the bottles are so small I decided to layer this over OPI Suzi Loves Cowboys.

The result? A gorgeous brown glittery mani perfect for fall and very suitable for work. Suzi Loves Cowboys turned out to be the perfect base for Glitter Forte 389 as well.





19 October 2012

Layla Softouch Fire It Up

I recently did a super amazing Halloween swap. It was the most fun I've had with a swap. We kept out group to 12 girls and went through Elfster. If you haven't used Elfster for your swaps, I highly recommend it! You can create groups for each of your swaps. Then add whatever you want to your wishlist. Next the admin of the swap group can start the swap and it randomly assigns names. Even the admin of the group doesn't know who has who which is fun! Your gift giver can also mark that they bought things off your wishlist, but you can't see that information so it's a huge surprise.

Anyway, we all had so much fun with our swapping that most of us went over our budgets, oops!

My gift giver gave me some great polishes that I'm going to try to work into my Halloween designs.

For today, I used 2 coats of Layla Softouch Fire It Up. It applied wonderfully and was super smooth going on. You could possibly use just one coat, but I tend to have a light hand when applying coats. Clean up was very nice too with almost not staining of the skin/cuticles which I normally get with such pigmented reds.  Finally I added some super cute stickers my gift giver also gave me.



16 October 2012

Blog Sale!

I'm having a blog sale to pare down my collection a bit. I would LOVE to get all these sold before the baby comes in about 5 weeks (eek!)

I am willing to negotiate on the prices listed so feel free to offer lower!!!

http://rubysnails.blogspot.com/p/blog-sale.html


14 October 2012

Frankenstein's Monsters

Today's Halloween mani features two of Frankenstein's monsters, both the male and female version.  I was inspired by a few pins I saw on Pinterest.

My inspiration for the stitches is from here, and for the female monster the idea came from here.


The green is used is OPI Don't Mess With OPI. I love this green, and I think it's perfect to use for Frankenstein's monsters.


08 October 2012

Boo! spider nails

I've got a bit more nail art for you today.  For the base coat, I used two coats of Essence Rich & Pretty. This is my first Essence polish, and I have to say I'm impressed. Great formula, love the brush, and it really does dry fast!

Then I added some nail art using Rimmel Black Satin and glitter with L.A. Girl Uninhibited.



03 October 2012

Sally Hansen Nail Strips

I've had these nail strips for a little bit and decided that I finally needed to use them since things were getting pretty busy around here. This design is called Girl Flower.  They were a bit fiddly to get on right, but they lasted quite a while so I'm pretty happy with them.

I again apologize for lack of posting, but with just under 7 weeks until my due date I'm pretty tired and still have tons to do to get ready for the baby. Plus I'm experiencing some pregnancy caused carpel tunnel so my joints are super sore (not very conducive to doing nails I'm afraid). I'll keep trying to post here as often as I can.





01 October 2012

Baby shower nails

Our baby shower was on Saturday so of course I had to do my nails for the occasion. My husband and I know the gender of the little one, but have decided to not tell anyone so I tried to keep my nails gender neutral (actually to us, most colors are gender neutral!).



The base coat is three coats of Revlon Minted.  The other colors I used were OPI The "It" Color (yellow), Rimmel Wild Orchid (purple), Sally Hansen Whirlwind White, and OPI Fly (blue).