Tuesday, November 17, 2015

First Attempt At Nail Stamping + Product Reviews

I won this new Formula X product by entering a photo of one of my manis in their Instagram contest! It's called Formula X Clix System To Go and it comes with 4 3ml bottles attached at the cap. It has a nail cleanser, base coat, nail color, and top coat. It's kinda similar to Zoya's Naked Manicure system, except smaller and more portable. 

I decided to kill 2 birds with one stone and use both my new Formula X Clix To Go system and my MoYou London XL Marshmallow Stamper and Pro Plate 04 stamping plate. 

The Formula X products were easy to work with. The actual polish was a bit streaky and floody on the first coat, so I did two coats and it looked beautiful and smooth. All of the products dried really quickly. I'm not sure the peachy pink polish is the best color on my skintone, but I'd be interested to try more of these sets with different polish colors. Overall these polishes are good quality and would be very convenient for traveling.

Now the stamping; I have to admit it was more difficult than I thought it would be. I used to think it looked like a lot of work, but I think I got a false sense of confidence from watching a bunch of stamping tutorial videos, haha.
After setting up all my supplies and removing the protective covering from the plate, I painted polish (Ulta LBD) onto one of the designs and immediately scraped off the excess polish holding the scraper at a 45° angle as I had seen demonstrated. This is where I encountered my first problem as I tried to press the design onto the stamper, I couldn't get it to transfer whatsoever. I tried a few more times but couldn't get anything on the stamper. I thought maybe it was the polish formula so I tried switching to a different polish but still didn't have much luck. I decided to try to clean off the plate and stamper with a cotton ball and thinner and that seemed to help. I still wasn't getting perfect images, but I was at least getting something. I'm surprised that I had to clean the tools between every nail in order to get a decent transfer; can anyone explain why that is? The videos did not explain how or how often to clean the tools. My nails don't look great, but by the time I was done I was sort of getting into a rhythm and somewhat getting the hang of the rolling motion for transferring the design to the nail. It was a bit frustrating, but was good practice. I'm probably going to take this design off tomorrow and try again; I think this is going to take a ton of practice for me to get good at it. Any tips would be much appreciated!

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