Happy Birthday To Me!!

It's my birthday, and I want to share it with all my nail polish lovers!! So I'm having a sale - the biggest sale Spellbound Nails has ever had ... and I'm releasing a crazy awesome duo!

Use the code BDAY30 on www.spellboundnails.com or www.spellboundnails.etsy.com for 30% off all orders for one day only - sale starts midnight EST! ALL ORDERS? Yes, it's crazy!! Ready for the other bit of crazy?

The duo that's releasing is The Joke's On You and it is a Joker and Harley Quinn inspired duo. Those of you who follow me on instagram will have seen my Harley Quinn cosplay for next year's Sci-Fi Valley Con come together and will know that I'm a litte lot obsessed with the Joker and Harley so what better way to celebrate my birthday than with this crazy couple??

This is Why Aren't You Laughing and is of course inspired by the Joker. It's a plum tinted jelly with a sprinkling of green squares, small red hexes and orange flakies to match the Joker's famous suit, grin, and hair.

This is Rev Up Your Harley and is a glitter topper packed full of red and black diamond glitters with small red, black, and white hexes to capture Harley Quinn in all her harlequin beauty.

Can I just say that I had some amazing bloggers swatch for this duo? Many thanks going out to paintednubbs, spilledmilknails, teasp00n.

And the scented polish lovers out there should be excited to know that I've added 12 new scents to the list of scents that can be added to any order, any polish but only through my main website www.spellboundnails.com.

Enjoy the sale while it lasts and happy shopping,
Ashley

The Fairy Tale Collection - Available Now

Those of you who have followed me for a while will know that I'm a HUGE fan of Disney. So I thought it was finally time to take some inspiration and create a fairy tale collection.

Full Size Collection ($52.00)

Mini Collection ($26.50)

Individual polishes, in mini and full size bottles, can also be purchased for our website for $4.50 per mini and $8 (Falling in Love) and $9 (for the rest of the collection).

I was so excited making this collection. I thought back to everything I read and watched as a kid and tried to put it into colors lol. The Fairy Tale Collection is meant to be the ultimate fairy tale experience for your nails. It'll take you through the highs and lows of finding love for the first time, losing love, fighting against everything and anything that stands in your way, and ultimately finding (and keeping) it again in the end.

There's shimmer and sparkle and even a glow in the dark villain.

I had the idea of holding the brush in the sun for a fun glowing brush shot and it turned out better than I hoped!

Looking for swatches? Look no further!

@teasp00n on Instagram

and

Painted Nubbs has a swatch and review blog post.

Until next time,

Ashley

Memorial Day Sale

Hello hello!!! There are a lot of Memorial Day sales out there but there can be only ONE Spellbound Nails sale. ;) (Highlander anyone?)

Use code MEMDAY20 (remember caps are important with codes) for 20% off anything and everything, no minimum required, 5/22 - 5/25. Code is good on both spellboundnails.com and spellboundnails.etsy.com. Also, I am lifting the restrictions on my ongoing promotion for this sale only so buy 5 full size bottles and get 1 full size or 2 minis of your choice (from current available stock) free with your order. Just let me know in the notes section during checkout what you'd like. :)

Mother's Day Sale

Hello lovelies! I wanted to have this posted at least a week ago but I've been down with a horrible cold. It seriously had me down and business halted for a few days. And while business is back up and running I'm still fighting the cough and sniffles over a week later. But better late than never, right? So without further ado here is this year's Mother's Day Sale!! Enjoy.

Use the code MOM2015 for 20% off all orders. Orders over $100 use the code MOM100 for 30% off!! The sale ends 11:59pm EST May 10th and can be used on our main site of spellboundnails.com and on our Etsy shop spellboundnails.etsy.com.

May the 4th Be With You,
Ashley

Spellbound Nails Harry Potter Inspired Book 1 Collection

Hello lovelies! I am so very excited for today's post. It's part one of my Christmas gift to you and something I've been planning for months and months ... pretty much since I started making nail polish I knew I wanted to do this collection. The idea has grown since then to be a massive, multiple collection idea that has taken so much planning but I'm finally ready to start sharing this with you. What is this massive top secret idea? Harry Potter, of course! Those of you who know me even a little know how utterly obsessed I am with Harry Potter! So many years after the last book and I still pick them up occasionally for a re-read.

I started this series in a way I thought was very appropriate - with Book 1. I took some of my favorite things from the book and turned them into polish. And in an attempt to be symbolic, I created 7 polishes. 7 books, 7 horcuxes, 

Since this will be such a long, image heavy post please click the Read More below. If you'd like to simply skip this post and check out the polish for yourself you can find it here.

Spellbound Nails Christmas 2014 Collection

Hello lovelies!!! Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate. I don't know about you but I'm more than ready to eat my weight in turkey and stuffing and all the fixin's today!

I'm also really excited to announce that my Christmas Collection is finally being released. :) I'm going to attempt to keep this short and to the point as I know a lot of you will be spending the day with family, some of you resting up for late night or early morning Black Friday shopping. So onto the polishes!

I used a little of everything Christmas in this collection and then added a dash of carefully chosen scent for each polish - optional of course.

I've always admired theses kinds of bottle/brush close ups so I decided to try my own. They're not hard to do and they look amazing so you'll definitely be seeing more of them in the future. Now I just have to work on getting the angle of each picture the same. :)

Reindeer poo is a brown tinted jelly with gold and tangerine flakies. The optional scent for this polish is reindeer poo - a slightly fruity scent with hints of woods and vanilla.

Candy Cane Kisses is like crushed candy canes for your nails with rainbow shimmer, red micro-glitter, white hex glitter, and red and white bar glitter. This polish comes with optional candy cane scent.

Elf Sweat is like candy in a jar. It has a clear rainbow shimmered base with dots in a variety of sizes and colors. This polish comes with optional elf sweat scent - like candy, candy canes, candy corn, syrup, and soda. It's a very sweet scent.

What Happens Under the Mistletoe (shortened to Under the Mistletoe to fit on my labels) is a green tinted base packed full of micro-flakies. The gold-green and red-gold flakies create an amazing gold shimmer that has an almost rainbow effect in various lights. This polish comes with optional mistletoe scent.

And last but not least is Frosty's Melting. I created this polish to look like a melted snowman with orange triangles for the nose, large and small black dots for coal eyes, mouth, and the buttons down the front. All packed into a white crelly base with blue shimmer and blue micro-flakies. This polish comes with optional snow/snowman scent - a vanilla mint with a hint of woods.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving ya'all. Be safe, happy, and healthy. :)

Until next time,
Ashley

Happy Halloween!!! Candy, Nail Art & My Halloween Costume - Image Heavy

*Post contains affiliate links. Purchases made via affiliate links provide small commissions to me but do not affect the purchaser's end of the transaction.

Hello lovelies and happy Halloween. This is my favorite time of year so boy do I have a post for you! It has candy and nail art and my Halloween costume! Are you ready?

Candy is essential to Halloween. No matter if you're manning the door for the hordes of fairy and monster (or Anna and Elsa this year) dressed trick or treaters, going out and knocking on doors yourself (with or without kids), or turning off your lights and gorging yourself on it while vegging with a night of horror movies this holiday kinda revolves around candy. So I thought, besides chocolate covered candy bars, that I would share one of my favorite candies with you.

I am being completely serious when I say Torie & Howard have some of the best, most amazing hard candy - and it's organic too if that makes a difference to you. The d'anjou pear & cinnamon candy (as seen in the Halloween bowl above) is my favorite of favorites.

How did I get enough to fill a Halloween bowl ... and still have some left over you ask? Is this a sponsored post where you get free candy to feed us a line? NO! I was subscribed to the Love with Food monthly box and got a sample in last year's Halloween box. Love ... there's no more to say. I searched and searched but couldn't find them around here and couldn't talk myself into paying shipping for candy (yet). I was at my breaking point when Love with Food had a sale on their website. I immediately used my referral and review points ... and bought a 5 pound bag. Yes, you read that right - a 5 pound bag.

Image Credit: Torie & Howard

Torie & Howard were so nice. They sent me my 5 pound bag of candy, a handwritten letter, a sample bag of all their flavors and an info packet that told me they were getting a new flavor! Meyer Lemon & Raspberry. How will I ever live without trying this new flavor? I don't know. If you can't live without trying these hard candies (and believe me you really can't!) head over to the Torie & Howard website and pick up some of your own or use their store locator to see if they're being sold near you. ;)

Halloween (at least for us nail people) is about what Halloween inspired nails we're wearing. Mine used a base of Instant Primordial Soup Mix from my Casper inspired Give Up The Ghost Collection.

Very simple to do with the right tools. I used my Silhouette machine to cut out spooky pumpkin faces and used the outside shape as a guide to sponge into instead of using the vinyls themselves. I just like the smoother feel this gives my nails better than painting over vinyls. As for the pumpkin faces ... I'm seeing Jack Skellington, Oogie Boogie ... and oddly The Snowmen from Doctor Who. Not sure about any others ... what do you see in the faces?

But the very best part of these nails ... they glow in the dark!!! And since I painted black over the glow you can see the faces perfectly when they glow. :)

And what Halloween is complete without a costume? For me - no Halloween! It's a tradition of mine to dress up and hand out candy and last night was the night for our community. Sadly, we live on the outskirts of a small town and the kids around here have pretty much outgrown trick or treating. We got one trick or treater and they came early so I wasn't fully in costume. :( So I'll share with you in hopes of curbing my disappointment.

I was a deer/faun this year. And I spent a few days and a few dollars crafting my leafy headband and my own ears. And then I took a day earlier in the week to test my makeup (if you follow my instagram @spellbound_nails you've already seen this test) so I'm very very happy with how I looked.

What did you or will you be getting up to this Halloween? Did you dress up? Leave me comments and/or pictures in the comments section below. ;)

As always, have a safe and haunting Halloween.
Until next time,
Ashley

*Post contains affiliate links. Purchases made via affiliate links provide small commissions to me but do not affect the purchaser's end of the transaction.

Haunted Nighttime Nail Art

Hello lovelies! I'm excited to bring you my very first Halloween mani. I did this one for the 1st and I'm sad to say I only managed to get one good pic and it's not completely color accurate. :(

I started with a base of Crisp Morning Air from my 2014 Fall Collection and used an eyeshadow applicator to dab a few splotches of Autumn Sunset. Autumn Sunset is a gorgeous purple polish with a blue shift and that just doesn't show here. It created such an amazing nightime-y effect for this creepy Halloween scene. :( If you're like my mom and you just don't see it ... my index nail has a spindly tree, bats on my middle finger, a haunted mansion on my ring, and a graveyard on my pinky finger with Happy Halloween written on my thumb complete with a raven perched on it. :)

I topped the sponged base with a coat of Seche Vite top coat and once the whole thing was completely dry I used some homemade Halloween vinyls to create the designs. Unlike my maple leaf nail art I used the outlines of the images this time and dabbed them with black. I apologize for the horrible camera quality pic but this is what I'm talking about when I say outline. I simply dabbed black into the outline and peeled the vinyl off leaving behind a perfect design ... so much easier and less time consuming than trying to hand paint everything. A time and place for everything, right? Be sure to get into the edges of the outline though for nice clean and crisp lines.

And for the thumb I simply used the vinyl image itself, sticking it to my nail and painting over it with two coats of top coat to smooth it all out.

If you want to see these colors as close to accurate as I think pictures can possibly capture head over to Painted Nubbs' blog post on the 2014 Fall Collection. She has some truly stunning swatches.

What kind of nail art are you most looking forward to seeing or trying this Halloween? Let me know in the comments. ;)

Until next time,
Ashley