Gothic Edgar Allan Poe 💀🥀| Halloween Mani

Hello everyone! Who’s in the Halloween spirit?! I am! I hope you have been attending some Halloween parties this weekend and having some ghoulish fun! I did decide last minute to attend a Halloween party on Friday, but I reused last year’s Halloween Flapper costume🙈. I just couldn’t be bothered to think of a whole new costume this year. I would much rather focus on Halloween nails!

One theme that I love to revisit every year is a gothic, dark romantic mani around Halloween. When my aunt saw this mani, she pointed out that it was very Edgar Allan Poe, and I would have to agree! The themes of Poe’s work very much surround death and of course the Raven is one of his most famous narrative poems.

For this manicure, I started by applying my favourite base coat, Orly Bonder, to all of my nails.
For the base colour I painted all of my nails a black with red shimmer (KL Polish Scorpio) followed by ILNP Underground. Underground is a stunning black jelly with holographic shimmer and orange-red-green flakies. This is easily my favourite Halloween nail polish.
For all the designs in this mani I used the Lina Nail Art Supplies Spookilicious! 01 Stamping Plate. This is an awesome plate for Halloween because it has a variety of designs on it, from zombies to witches and ghosts to typical Halloween designs like candy corn.
For my middle finger I reverse stamped a skull and rose design. I used a black stamping polish (Born Pretty Store #3) and filled in the skulls with white (China Glaze White on White), the roses with a red (Cirque Colors Ruby) and the leaves with a silver (China Glaze Icicle) with the Maniology 106 Drawing Brush. What reverse stamping means is that you transfer the pattern from the plate onto your stamper with a polish shade that you want to be your outline, and then you fill in the design with different polish colours directly on the stamper. After that has dried, you can then stamp the whole pattern onto your nail.
Before applying the reverse stamped design, I applied another coat of base coat to my middle finger nail and allowed it to dry for a minute or two. This made the nail slightly tacky, so that the designs would transfer better. I then transferred the design.
I finished off the ring finger by directly stamping on the ravens with a silver stamping polish (Born Pretty Store #2)
I finished off the mani by applying the Maniology Smudge Free Top Coat (Use code SUPERNOVA10 to save 10% off Maniology purchases (affiliate)), followed by my regular glossy top coat (Seche Vite Dry Fast Top Coat).