Literary Nails: Spellcaster Wild Card by Nikki Jefford

Omg look at me with another nail art post this year 😏 I do my nails A LOT, like, every week. I just don't do a lot of bookish nail art. But I did some this past week for a book I was highly anticipating and I love how they turned out! And the book itself (I actually just started it this week! I'm only like 100 pages in or so, but I'm liking it!) is very magical with a lot of supernatural beings, so it is perfect for this time of year!

Spellcaster Wild Card by Nikki Jefford
Release date: October 1st 2024

Win the game. Change the world.

Winning the show means living forever. It is the golden ticket to fame, fortune, and a place among the vampire elite.

Being remade isn’t on my wish list. I like being me, and with nearly a million online followers, it’s working. My parents and big sister are the do-gooders in our family who want to make the world a fair and just place for all humans and paranormal creatures. I just want to finish high school and keep doing what I do best—sharing hair and beauty tips while discussing Spellcaster and how the show’s vampire judge Malachi Rayne is the hottest male on the planet.

Then, life as I know it ends. There are evil forces who will stop at nothing to maintain world dominance—indefinitely.

It’s hard to care when I’ve become dead inside and out.

After my family is violently attacked, the host of Spellcaster insists I audition for Season 13. For the first time in the show’s history, they want to represent every species of paranormals. That’s me now. Not human. Not vampire. Not the class of creature anyone EVER cheers for.

This season’s prize is power beyond anyone’s imagination. It is the kind of reward that contestants and their sponsors would kill to possess.

Let the other contestants and judges underestimate me. They can gossip all they want about the hotshot wizard and the alpha werewolf behaving as though I’m another prize to be won. And if Coach Malachi can’t handle a bold influencer with abilities, then he can suck it. I preferred watching him from the other side of the screen. He’s about to discover that Haylee Hutchins is a force to be reckoned with. The whole world will.

Someone thought they could silence my family for good. Instead, they created a monster. I’m still here, and I am much harder to kill.

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And here is the nail art I did:

This time I didn't take pictures as I did the nail art step by step like I usually do, and it's mostly because the gel polish I was using gave me a headache because it smelled terrible 😖 I don't mess with gel polish too often, I love my regular polishes, but I used chrome powders with this nail art and those always look better with gel. And honestly, it was worth it, headache and all 😆

And these are the products I used (after taking this picture I realized that I did not, in fact, include everything I used 🤦‍♀️ Lol. I also used a glossy top coat from Holo Taco and a matte top coat from OPI. I was too lazy to retake the picture 😆 Also, ignore the fact that I used TWO basecoats. My nails have been breaking a lot lately so I figured an extra layer of polish wouldn't hurt 😂):

Holo Taco - Long-Lasting BaseHolo Taco - Pink Smoothing Base Holo Taco - One-Coat Black Moyra - SGP 01 Black Gel Stamping PolishASP - Gel Top Coat Twinkled T - Mirror Chrome Powder Whats Up Nails - Lilac Chrome Powder
I'll give you a quick rundown on what I did before we move on to some close-ups of the nail art: Base coat first! In my case, I did two because I'm crazy. Lol. Next, I did two coats of black nail polish and a coat of a glossy top coat. And after that, I did a coat of matte top coat just so the chrome powder wouldn't stick where it wasn't supposed to. At this point, all the polishes I used were regular nail polishes, but we are switching to gel polish now. And yes, you can use a mix of regular and gel polish. BUT the trick to putting gel over regular polish is that you have to let the regular nail polish dry completely. Otherwise, your regular nail polish will just be perpetually wet under the gel and it will wrinkle and not look cute at all. So. Lol. Next, I used the following two stamping plates:

Using the black gel stamping polish, I picked up the images, stamped them on my nails, and cured the polish. Then I just rubbed the chrome powder over the image, dusted off the loose powder, applied a gel topcoat over everything, cured it, and done! Okay, that's enough of that. Lol. Here are some close-ups. Lol.

We have a pretty skull and a pentagram/moon situation...

A snake and a crystal/moon/star combo...

And I cute little moth! I work at an elementary school and the kids love looking at my nails. And when I wore this, I even got compliments from the 5th-grade boys! I was shocked! But they liked the snake, so 😂

So what do you think? Did I nail it? 😜