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Halloween Nail Tutorials: Black Cat Nails!

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

It’s time to start thinking about how you’ll accessorize for Halloween! Nail art enthusiasts have come up with dozens of designs that range from candy-themed to downright gory.

However, walking around with pumpkins or ghosts on your nails might not make sense once Halloween has passed, and it’s hard to find time to redo your nails when you’re catching up on homework! So, I wanted to come up with a design that would still look festive, but chic enough to keep on for days afterwards. With the right colors, these black cats are sure to go with any outfit!

What you’ll need:

  • Nail polish: a base color and black (I used Essie in “Cocktail Bling” for my base)
  • A small brush or dotting tool for drawing the cats

How to do it:

1) Paint on your base color and let it dry. If you haven’t yet, see my tips for getting the perfect base coat.

2) Get out a pen and paper and practice drawing different cat shapes. With such a precise design, it’s important to know what specifically you want to do before you dip your brush into the polish.

3) Using your small brush or dotting tool, carefully draw your cat on whichever nail(s) you choose. For my design, I started with the head, body, and tail before adding the ears and feet.

Here it is close up:

4) Once you’ve drawn on as many cats as you’d like, let it all dry and seal it in with a topcoat. Now you’re ready for Halloween and the week afterwards!

Colleen is a Creative Writing and Professional Writing double major at Carnegie Mellon University, and will be graduating in May 2014. She is currently the Director of Social Media for Her Campus CMU, and partakes in a handful of other organizations on campus. When she's not writing, she's probably reading or spending time with her residents as an RA in a freshman dorm.
Laura Stiles is a Creative Writing, Professional Writing double major at Carnegie Mellon University who will be graduating in May 2014. In addition to being Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Carnegie Mellon chapter of HerCampus.com, she is Co-Prose Editor of The Oakland Review, Carnegie Mellon’s literary-arts journal, a manuscript reader for Carnegie Mellon University Press, and has copy-edited for Carnegie Mellon’s newspaper, The Tartan. She was also Communications and Arts Management Intern at The Hillman Center for Performing Arts in summer 2012, and is ecstatic to be studying abroad in Sheffield, England in spring 2013. In her free time, she enjoys singing along to music on long car rides, spontaneously kicking off her shoes to explore lakes and creeks, and curling up with a soft blanket and a captivating book. She was also recently pleasantly surprised to discover that she has a taste for sushi.