Hey there! Today I'm reviewing two exciting products from UberChic Beauty - the new Furry Best Friends plate and the Luxe stamper. Furry Best Friends is one of UberChic's single plates (ie. not in a collection) that so many UberChic fans were crying out for. People definitely love their fur babies so it's not surprising that they want to wear their love on their nails. The other product, the Luxe stamper, I couldn't wait to try because I had seen that it can be used to shrink images. So today you get to see my results from that as well.
Furry Best Friends is a plate that celebrates the nail fanatic's four-legged friends. It's is chock full of images dedicated to cats and dogs. Personally, my family has always had dogs despite my allergies. We like dogs enough that I'm willing to live off allergy pills anytime I see the fam...which is really often! The plate measures 9.5 x 14.5 cm with the full images being 17 x 21 mm (though, as you'll see in a second, you can make that a bit smaller with a stamper trick if need be). The etching of this plate is fabulous, as always.
For my first mani, I wanted to use the paw prints because they were adorable to me and because I can never ever resist UberChic's negative space images. I started by making a marble-like base using Loaded Lacquer No Shirt, Nfu Oh JS01, 03 and 39 and Essie Marshmallow. On its own this base wasn't exactly pretty but it looks pretty good under this stamping.
For my second mani I used the shrinking technique using the Luxe stamper so I'll talk about the stamper now. With this stamper, you get a scraper and two stamping heads, one white and one black, so you can use both light and dark colours to stamp without having issues seeing your image. The stamper head is approximately 3.5 cm across and is a medium-soft non-sticky style. The handle has a slight bell shape to it which makes it a dream to hold. In order to use it all I did was give the heads a quick rinse in dish soap (now standard practice to me - I don't even try to stamp before washing off the oils that soft stampers usually have in/on them). I didn't do any other priming and it picked up images perfectly.
Now for the explanation of how this stamper works when you want to shrink a stamping image. You can see here that the stamping head is quite a big bigger than the holder. So when you put the head in the stamper it creates a very rounded surface with an air bubble underneath. It's this rounded surface that helps shrink the image. To shrink, you place the stamper in the holder, pick up the image and then take out the stamping head and stamp without the holder. This flattens out the stamper and pulls the image in from the edges, resulting in a smaller image. Please note, with this style of stamper, it's best to roll to pick up the image.
I tried shrinking a few UberChic designs off various plates that I thought might be too large for my nails with their original size. I measured the width and height of each image and compared them to their original size and found that, on average, the images would shrink by 10-20% using the Luxe stamper trick. Awesome!
Here's the difference it made in the hipster dog image I used for this second Furry Best Friends mani. I couldn't get it to stay put on paper (how I stamper the above image) so I stamped it on the Uber Mat with clear coat down. You can see how the original (left) goes all the way to the right side of the nail template whereas the shrunken (right) image still has quite the gap. The image got a tiny bit distorted using the shrunken technique but probably not enough to notice if I hadn't been looking out for it (and then mentioned it to you). I can tell you that I'm going to be using this stamper a ton for shrinking images. My nails aren't particularly large so I frequently avoid using some image...but no more! Now I can go nuts with all the big designs!
Now onto my last mani of the day. I started with two coats of Ella + Mila Lavender Fields and then stamped the cat and dog silhouettes with Mundo de Unas Ribbon. Then I applied the decals I made with my Luxe-shrunken images and Mundo de Unas polishes. I'm so glad I could shrink them so I could fit all of their cute faces on my nails! Love love love these little hipsters!
Thanks for stopping by! The details on today's products can be found below. That's all for my new UberChic reviews this week but tomorrow I should have the results of a two week decal experiment using the Uber Mat that I recently finished so I hope you can check that out too!
Price: $14.99/plate and $8.99/stamper
Available on UberChic Beauty's website
'Til next time...
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