This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at UNCW chapter.

Since I was a kid, one aspect of beauty that I’ve always loved is nail art. When I was little I would paint just about anything with nail polish. It did usually end up on my nails, and hands, maybe the floor or table–just everywhere really. I’ve grown my nail polish collection considerably over the years and have been expanding into different types of nail designs, including stencils, vinyls, stamping, powders, and so much more. Thanks to the incredible nail art communities on Instagram and YouTube, there is an endless number of designs to try and replicate.

Back in 2014, I made my very first attempt at Halloween Nails and I’m proud to say it wasn’t terribly unsuccessful. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve done anything that good since. (Though I do tend to litter my Instagram with my attempts at photo-worthy nail looks).

Anyway, because of my love for nail art, I thought I would share some fun Halloween nail art with you lovely readers. Over the past two weeks I’ve been trying out various looks and I wanted to share my experiences with you. These were all found on or inspired by Pinterest posts. Also, as you’ll see, I am not a professional nail technician at all, so don’t think the way I do things is the only and/or best way. I will include a detailed list of my materials at the bottom of this post.

1. Matte Orange with Stripes

The first look I tried was this very simple one:

I wanted to start off with something rather easy. For this one, I used white, orange, and black nail polish. On each look, I used a peel-off base coat which made for an easy switch between looks without the use of acetone (but this is not required for any of the looks). For this look, I used both a glossy and matte topcoat—glossy for the black and white, matte for the orange. Also, a helpful tool is a detailing nail brush.

This one is pretty straight forward. After your base coat of choice, apply orange to your thumb, pointer, and middle nail, and then white on your ring and pinky nail. Once those have dried, layer on black lines over the white, and a matte topcoat on the orange. After the black dries, apply a glossy top coat of your choice over the ring and pinky nails.

For me, as you can see, I have pretty shaky lines—my hands shake with fine lines like that and my brush wasn’t the greatest. But, I did enjoy wearing the look and I feel like using vinyls/stencils or even tape would make the lines less uneven. Just be sure not to use the tape/vinyl until after the white dries fully, but peel it off before the black dries.

On my other hand (channeling my inner Cristine @simplynailogical) I used a really nice cranberry color (maybe closer to cherry?) with a matte topcoat that didn’t compliment my main hand at all but looked classy nonetheless.

2. Gold Pumpkin

Next, I did two looks at the same time. The first was this really lovely look that I think is a great way to focus more on autumn than Halloween. It’s a cozy and relaxing look that honestly wasn’t too hard to do. Here’s the original look:

Again, nail vinyls or tape would’ve been helpful here. But I like to make things difficult for myself so I used a detailing brush. For this look, I used the same polishes as before, adding only a sparkly gold polish.

I was a big fan of this one, and since I was wearing it in September it worked fairly well. It was easy to do and looked pretty nice.

3. Ghost-In-The-Dark

While I was doing the previous look on my left hand, I also did another look (one that definitely doesn’t match) on my right hand.

This one was inspired by a few different looks, so I’ll just show you what I created. I used black and white nail polishes, a glossy topcoat, and a glow-in-the-dark topcoat.

I couldn’t include a picture of the glow-in-the-dark aspect but it looks really cool at night. I highly recommend playing with glow-in-the-dark this season in particular. This one was also, I think, the easiest by far–probably because I didn’t have to draw a straight line.

4. Is this a “Look”?

This last isn’t necessarily a complete look, but that’s mostly because I got a little carried away with the stamping plate. For this, I used black nail polish, a gel top coat (still with the peel-off base for my own convenience), chrome/mirror nail powder, linear holographic polish, a Halloween stamping plate, and black stamping polish. (and a UV light to cure the gel topcoat).

To create this:

Paint your nails black
Apply a gel top coat and cure for 60 seconds
Buff the chrome/mirror nail powder gently into the nail
A coat of linear holographic topcoat
With black stamping polish, choose your design and apply it to the nail of your choice. (I used the ghost face on my ring finger, an evil-looking pumpkin for my middle finger, and a moth for my pointer—just to play around with the different designs).
Glossy or gel topcoat

This is a lot of polish so be sure to let each layer dry before applying another—except for steps 2 and 3, just curing should be enough for that step.

Overall, decorating my nails for Halloween was really fun and sharing it with you lovely Her Campus readers has been exciting. I really hope you try these out! If you do let me know (tag me on Instagram or something, if you want) because I’d love to see them. I’m going to keep trying new looks since there’s still many weeks left until Halloween.

Happy Halloween!

Materials!

Here is everything I used to create these looks (with the exception of the detailing brush). I’ve done my best to list all of the colors/names of each item and their approximate prices so you can find them if you’d like. But again, if you have anything similar on hand then there’s no need to go buy new products although I do recommend Holo Taco endlessly. Cristine and her team have done amazingly creating this. Her videos are also hilarious, if you haven’t heard of her.

[Photos courtesy of pinterest.com, @lifestylesspace, Jasmine Hughes/@Jazzberry400]

[Gifs courtesy of giphy.com]

Matte Orange with Stripes