Halloween Nail Art: Purple Glam, Stars and Scars

Halloween is coming up, and I just feel so inspired to do some Halloween nails! I'll be frank - the Halloween nail art that I did last year sucked, so I thought that this year, I had a lot of room for improvement. And this year, I present to you this!

This year, I used the classic Halloween of purple and orange. I used Zoya Yasmeen as a base. I have to tell ya, Zoya Yasmeen is da bomb. I've done a Zoya Yasmeen NOTD back in the day waaay back when, and I still love it!


I then placed these orange stars randomly on my mani, and then I added in the white scars freehand with a long nail art brush.


I actually really like the overall effect, the stars over the purple add a little bit of glam, while the white scars added a little bit of an edge. It's glam but still very much a Halloween manicure! Actually it already looked good enough with just the orange stars, but I figured out that a little edge to the nail look couldn't hurt!


Actually, I don't really celebrate Halloween at all, but I kind of just like utilizing some of the colours for nail art just to go along with the festive mood of the season. Anyone else having fun with Halloween on your nails?

Zoya Yasmeen NOTD: Fulfilling My Nars Purple Rain Lemming

With all the hype going on about NARS' Purple Rain, you'd think that in addition to making your nails look great, it would also do your dishes, vacuum the floor, do your laundry, and buy you flowers and chocolates on Valentine's Day. But nah, it does none of these things - other than making your nails look fabulous, that is. And so, it's not worth all the hype, and the money. At least, that's what I tell myself over and over. It's not that great. You don't need it. It's expensive. And goodness knows I have a gazillion purple nail polishes in my stash. (I happen to have a thing for purples. And taupes.)

So, I told myself, there must be a substitute for NARS Purple Rain. Not a dupe, definitely, but maybe something in the same glowy-purple-with-shimmer category. And since I have a gazillion purples, I probably already have it in my stash. Thus, I dug around in my stash, and found this beauty called Zoya Yasmeen. It's currently my NOTD, and although it's not at all a dupe of Purple Rain, it's utter gorgeousness is making me forget about NARS.

I'm sorry if application was a bit sloppy on this one, I did my nails at 3am in the morning (there's a reason for that, and if you were following me on Twitter, you'd know why. LOL. But if you're curious, you can read the relevant tweets in order: here and here, followed by here and here, then here and here, and finally here and here. As you can tell, I reeeaaaalllly haaaate having my sleep interrupted. All my classes are early in the mornings this term, and as a result I don't get much sleep on weekdays. So catching up on sleep during the weekends is really important to me.)

Here it is in natural light. Please forgive the watermarking, there are reasons for it. The first reason is that lately, commercial sites have been stealing nail bloggers' pictures (and for some reason nail pictures get stolen a lot more than makeup pictures), and they even crop out watermarks, so if you want to prevent photo theft you really have to watermark the entire picture, like I'm attempting to do. The second reason is that my friend has installed GIMP in my computer, and I'm having a lot of fun attempting to use it to watermark my pictures. LOL. I've no idea how to edit colours etc though, so it's primarily a watermarking tool for me, since previously I was using Paint to watermark my pictures.



I love how Yasmeen has this glowy look about it that makes the colour look half-alive. It's darkened at the edges, but it's still visibly purple in all lights, and it has the most lovely gold (or is it gold? I can't quite tell...It might be multi-coloured) shimmer. I really love this one, it looks pretty both indoors and out, unlike some polishes which look nice outdoors but flat in indoor lighting and vice versa.

Here is a not-too-great photo of Zoya Yasmeen indoors. You can really see the gold (or whatever colour it is) shimmer here:



As you can see, the shimmer is really a lot more obvious indoors. It doesn't really look like shimmer though, instead the effect is more of a glow, which I really like. Yasmeen also applied beautifully, like most Zoyas do, and very little cleanup was required. However, despite the depth of colour, it was only semi-opaque in one coa, so two coats is still necessary for full opacity. Wear time is pretty decent, too. There's nothing I don't like about Yasmeen.

So Zoya Yasmeen isn't anywhere close to Nars Purple Rain. But it's pretty in it's own right, and it has this lovely glowy shimmer that the NARS doesn't, so I'm pretty happy. To paraphrase the proverb, a nail polish in the stash is worth two in the store. LOL.

Dupes Or Not? Zoya Ki vs GOSH Purple Heart

You know you've got a large enough stash when you finally have dupes of things in your stash! You know what I mean - the two brown eyeshadows that look exactly alike, or the two pale pink glosses that are exactly the same when you wear them. I guess having duplicates is a sign that you're having too much. In that case, I guess I'm almost reaching the optimal number of bottles of nail polish to have, because...I have a dupe! Sort of. It depends.

Over the course of my purple and duochrome fetish, I've collected GOSH Purple Heart and Zoya Ki - both of which are dear to my little beating heart because they're both purple, AND duochromes. How cool is that! They also both apply well, and dry relatively fast (the GOSH definitely dries faster than the Zoya though). However, they're also both deep violet purples with green duochrome, so I decided to get both of them out one fine day to see if they were really dupes or not!

Here's a bottle pic of both of them side by side: GOSH Purple Heart is on top, Zoya Ki is at the bottom. Please ignore the fact that there are stray cotton bits stuck to the GOSH bottle - it's all Superdrug's fault for sticking these HUGE eternally sticky tags on their bottles that just pick up any speck of dust in sight. (They should find out what kind of glue Superdrug uses and just make Superglue out of that.)



Hmmm, they do look dupe-y, don't they? But of course, looks can be deceiving (I mean, really! Think of all the good-looking guys out there who are jackasses...but I digress), so I decided to swatch them.

This is one coat of both on all the nails. Please be warned - these are quick and dirty swatches, so they're REALLY BAD. Like, you know, polish on cuticles, polish overflow, raggedy cuticles, weird nail shapes and lengths (we do not mention that..My nails have been through a hard time, and they don't like to talk about it). I've just ordered Burt's Bees Cuticle Cream, and I hope it'll fix part of the problem, and as you can tell these were photos from before my nails became nubbins. In anycase, consider yourself forewarned.



GOSH Purple Heart is on the index and ring, while Zoya Ki is on the middle and pinky fingers.

Now they look different. For one, the Zoya is a lot more sheer than the GOSH. In fact, the GOSH is practically opaque in one coat (which is why it's one of my favourite polishes to Konad with - check out this KOTD and this KOTD for proof of it's Konading awesomeness), but I don't think I'd Konad with the Zoya. So if you want a polish to Konad with, definitely go with the GOSH.

But of course, since few people use just one coat of polish, here are "proper" swatches, with two coats of polish on each nail:



GOSH Purple Heart is on the index and ring, while Zoya Ki is on the middle and pinky fingers.

Okay, so they're not dupes, but they're similar. Both of them are a similar shade of deep violet purple, with a green duochrome. The only difference is that the GOSH is a lot more of a vampy colour, as it's more blackened, whereas Ki is still visibly purple in most lights. Purple Heart also has this very pretty glowy, lit-from-within quality that makes it almost black around the edges but glowy purple on the front of the nail. Very cool. Ki has a similar kind of glowiness, but it's not quite a vampy, because it's not blackened enough.

So which one should you buy? It depends. Do you want your purple-green duochromed very blackened? If so, take the GOSH. Do you want to Konad with it? Then definitely take the GOSH. Do you want it to be visibly purple in most lights? Take the Zoya. I suppose for that among non-nail fanatics, noone's going to notice the difference, even though they're not dupes. However, I'm kind of happy that they're not all that similar - it means I get to keep both!