Halloween Novelty Polishes

With October half over already, I figured I'd best get to using some of Halloween polishes I've grabbed from all the holiday displays over the past month or so. Today I have a trio from the Phantom Frights displays. I got these at Meijer but have seen the same ones at Rite Aid, too (though they're more expensive at Rite Aid); none have individual shade names.



Both of the crystal cap styles come with various colors of polish; I chose black creme for my skull and crossbones one as it coordinated nicely and didn't distract from the bling of the cap. Though I bought it for the bottle, the polish is actually decent; I used only one coat here:



As I mentioned in my Halloween display post, some of the pumpkin polishes this year are skull and crossbones glitter; I bought all three colorways but this traditional black and white is the first I've tried. There is also some small iridescent glitter in the clear base along withe the skulls (which could also be interpreted as jumping gingerbread men with big heads—maybe we'll see them in brown when the snowmen polishes show up for Christmas).



As far back as I recall (which admittedly is only about five years in this case), the pumpkin polishes have come from Blue Cross, but these say they're from Cosmetics Industries. I'll be interested to see if the snowmen are the same this year.



Only when it came time to put on the Skull Deco Nail Color (as the label calls it) did I realize my error in choosing the black base: the black skulls were not going to show up on that. Ooops. As it turned out, the skulls were so reluctant to come out of the bottle that getting only white ones on my nails was not an issue. I ended up slicking on one coat, with only the small iridescent glitter ending up on my nail, then dumping some of the polish out onto a paper card so I could pick up and place the white skulls with a dotting tool onto two of my nails. I found this polish noticeably more smelly than the crystal cap one; it had that strong chemical scent I associate with the pre big 3 free days (thought now we're up to what, big 5 free? or is it more now?). The chunky orange glitter in the jack o'lantern crystal cap bottle came out just fine; I put that on the two nails that had no skulls, then slicked clear topcoat over everything.



This year's pumpkins, like the ones that came before, have two faces, the smiley (in the bottle pic at the top) and the scary.



I think the iridescent glitter in the skull polish is a nice touch and looks great on the black, so I'm glad to have it in my stash. I'm also glad to have the crystal cap polishes; they even have the designs on the top, too.



In the category of novelty polishes, I give these a B+ as a group. To get an A, the skull glitter one would have to not be so stinky and releas the skulls from the bottle more readily.