Stamping Experiments

When I wore the CND Night Factory duo recently and discovered that Urban Oasis was a one-coater, I thought I should try stamping with it, since surely it would be opaque enough. I got a chance to play with it last night and it worked great.



For my base color, I used Borghese Arrivederci Mist, one of the new core colors. Any wonkiness in the stamping is not the fault of Urban Oasis but operator error on my part; I just haven't gotten enough practice yet. (And my impatience shows up in the smears from me putting on a top coat too soon after stamping.)

The design I used is from the plate in a stamping kit that the Born Pretty nail art store sent to me for review. The plate is labeled M71 and has nine designs on it: the flower I used above, a smaller flower with leaves trailing from it, a swirly one I can't figure out, grapes, a cat, a four-leaf clover (I'm thinking St. Patrick's Day mani), a butterfly, dolphins, and Hello Kitty. This plate, like others, comes with an pretty much invisible plastic film on it that must be peeled off before use. (If you guessed I know this from experience, you'd be right. Here's a tip: if you can't get polish to stay in the design when you scrape off the excess, ask yourself "did I remove the plastic film?") I don't like the sound or feel of metal on metal, so I didn't use the scraper from the kit but instead wielded my trusty plastic Humane Society membership card.



Since I've seen this plate referred to as the "Hello Kitty plate" on a few different nail blogs, I figured I had to try that design. It amused to me to use Banana Creme, one of the Hello Kitty polishes I'd gotten from Sephora as my base color. For the stamping, I tried Revlon Top Speed in Bubble, a bright pink, very girlie creme. What I didn't think about was Bubble is just about the same color as the surface of the stamper, so while I tried to see where the design was so I could place it on my nails, the polish was drying out and thus I didn't get any really good transfers. Again, operator error. The plate was fine, the polish was fine; my stamping skills are not quite there yet. Keep that in mind as you gaze upon my randomly placed incomplete Hello Kitty heads below.



Born Pretty sells the set with the M71 plate, the stamper, and the scraper for US$3.88. They also have a French tip stamping kit with two plates and the stamper and scraper for US$4.85, and two different sets of 12 plates for $12.63 (one of which includes the M71 plate). If you use code KARENDK31 you will get 10% off from now through March 31, 2011.

The stamper and plate shown in this entry were provided to me for free for review purposes. The content of the entry was not dictated by the provider, and I get to keep the tools for my own use.