Hey there! For those of you who haven't heard yet, a wonderful Canadian indie polish, Girly Bits Cosmetics, has gotten into the stamping game! I've been a big fan of Girly Bits for a long time so this is great news for me. So far one stamping plate and thirteen stamping polishes have been released and I was lucky enough to be sent them for review. Us stamping folk noticed that there is a big lack of 3 or 5-free stamping polishes with a creme finish so that's what Girly Bits has brought us, along with some metallic shades. Keep reading to see all the details, including many many manis that I've done to test out the polish and the plate.
I'll start this review with the inaugural Girly Bits stamping plate, GBC 1-01. Pam, the creator, polled some stamping girls to see what they'd like and I love how Pam worked in a lot of the ideas including a water marble image, matching positive and negative space images, the Girly Bits logo and, of course, the Canadian maple leaf. A couple of my favourites (though I didn't use them for today's post) are the stars (which are actually made of music notes - based on a tattoo of Pam's in honour of her daughter's musical career) and the negative space splatter...how fun is that! The plate itself measures 9.5 x 14.5 cm with the full nail images measuring 17 x 21 mm. I tried out most of the image and the stamping quality is spot on.
To look at the stamping polish, I want to start with a couple of nail art looks I did using them before I get to the straight swatches. For the first one I did some gradient stamping using some of the metallic shades (from top to bottom: Firebrick, Saffron, British Racing Green and Sapphire) over black. I smushed up the polish on my pinky but, other than that mistake of mine, I love how this looked!
For the second mani, I wanted to use the stamped water marble image and use leadlighting to make it look like a Christmas water marble. I stamped with Little Black Dress over white polish and then leadlighted with Esmaltes da Kelly Soap Bubbles in Wine and Green. This is WAY easier than a real water marble!
Now for the swatches. Since I use more black and white stamping polish than any other color, I wanted to do a full mani with each of Little Black Dress and White Wedding. Both have creme formulas and stamp great. To test out Little Black Dress I used the Girly Bits logo and wording over a white creme polish. I had some minor streaking with my top coat but that's more likely to be an issue of my application or the top coat formula than the stamping polish, in my experience.
White Wedding is ever so slightly less than 100% opaque over black BUT it is as good as the other 3-free white I've tried but White Wedding is 5-free.
Now onto the colors starting with the greens and blues. We have Emerald and Cobalts for the cremes and British Racing Green and Sapphire for the more metallic finishes. They all stamp great over white but are less bright over black. British Racing Green looks a bit more flecked than Sapphire, possibly due to pigment different.
Next we have the metallics - Silver Bells, Golden Ticket, Saffron and Bronze Goddess. Opposite to the blues/green, these all show up even better over black than they do over white, though the only one that was really difficult to see over white was Golden Ticket.
Finally we have the oranges/reds - Bronze Goddess, Flame, Firebrick and Fire Engine Red. Bronze Goddess, Flame and Firebrick all have a metallic finish and Fire Engine Red is the creme of the bunch. If you stamp at all, you know how hard it is to find a red that stamps over black but Fire Engine Red does a pretty good job (please excuse the squished polish for the black swatches). I've shown Bronze Goddess again here (along with it's inclusion with the metallics above) so you can see how it compares with Flame, another bronze-y metallic. Flame is darker/more red than Bronze Goddess is whereas Bronze Goddess looks like it leans more gold.
While you won't be able to get these in time for Christmas, Girly Bits is currently having a gift certificate sale until December 31, 2015 at 12 pm EST so if you have someone on your list who might like these or other Girly Bits products, a gift certificate would make a great gift!
Where to buy: stamping polish / plate
Cost: $10 CAD (currently ~$7.18 USD)/9 mL stamping polish
$24 CAD (currently ~$17.24 USD)/stamping plate
'Til next time...
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