Nail Plate Size Comparison Chart

Hello!

For ages, I've been promising to give you a post comparing the relative size of different nail plate images. I don't know why, but I keep having some mental block about it and keep forgetting to post it. So right now, while I'm thinking about it, before I can forget, I'm going to schedule it. :)

First, a wonderful, awesome, amazing fellow blogger made the job so much easier for me; she created these comparison charts and gave me permission to post them here. Please, if you like them, show her some love by visiting her blog by clicking here:

These give visual comparisons and centimeter measurements for most of the well-known nail-plate brands. You can use this in several ways:

1) Visual inspection: if you know that Konad will fit your nails, you can do a quick look to see which are the same size or larger.

2) If you know the length of your nails, you can find an image size here in centimeters that is long enough to cover.

3) If you're looking at a new brand and have the image size dimensions, you can look at this to see which it's closes to before buying.

There are three brands that I routinely review which aren't included here. One is LeaLac, and they have the biggest images in the business (that I've found so far). By my measurements, they are one inch square, which converts to 2.54 cm on each side! So you can see how much bigger that is even than Fun 1&2 shown above. The other brand is Drikk; these are 7/8th of an inch tall (2.22cm) and 6/8th of an inch wide (1.90cm). Finally, I have reviewed plates I got from Magno Nails (you can also find these other places, but I refer to them by that name since that's where I bought them), and they come in at 7/8ths tall (2.22cm) and 5/8th of an inch wide (approx. 1.60cm); so they are about the same size as the Nail Craze images, but a titch taller.

I hope this has been a help to you! Thanks for your patience waiting for so long for this while I continually forgot to post it. If there are any other brands that you have questions about let me know and I'll try to find out the information for you. :)

And thanks again to Posh Nail Art for the amazing chart!!!

Thanks for looking! Big hugs,
M.

Before & After: Z is for Zoya FeiFei + Magno Nails O

Hello!

Today is the last of the Llama Nails alphabet challenge letters for me! I'm finishing one week behind, but OMG, I actually did every single letter, and I'm completely stoked about that!

Now, you may be asking yourself...'Hey Michelle! We don't remember seeing a 'Y' manicure!'. Yeah. ::coughs::

See, what had happened was? I decided it would be a cool manicure to combine with my Cheeky twin post challenge, and forgot that I couldn't post that one until tomorrow. So for the next two days, in my world, I'm going to pretend there was a little time warp-wormhole sort of thing. Hey, who's to say that Y should come before Z anyway? I for one will not be held down by thousands of years of convention! >.>.....<.<.....>.<

On to the manicure! I started with one of my favorite Zoya polishes, the subtle duochrome with the sparkly glass-flecked kick, FeiFei:

Zoya FeiFei...look at those colors...

Zoya Fei Fei slightly blurry to show glass-flecked color differences

Next I decorated it with Magno Nails plate O and Pure Ice Silver Mercedes...I picked a sort of a cosmic-ish image because the polish has a sort of cosmic feel to me:

This shows the duochrome a bit better :)

I love silver with this polish, and I think this starburst pattern works very well with it. Hope you like it too!

Xoxox,
M.

Before & After: 'W' is for Whimsical Ideas by Pam Peanut Butter And Jelly

Hello!

I think most people have seen this polish, but I love it and I haven't seen it around the blogosphere in a while, so I had to feature it as my 'W'...which is for Whimsical Ideas by Pam Peanut Butter And Jelly. This is a deep wine jelly with golden glitters; despite my love/hate relationship with jellies, I love this one and don't have to struggle with it too much because the formula is very nice. :)

Whimsical Ideas by Pam Peanut Butter And Jelly

For some reason when I was staring into it, it made me think of pretty coins in a fountain with colored water...not that I've ever seen such a thing, mind you! So I decided to turn it into a surreal pond with gold water lilies and copper shimmer and hexes at the tips:

I stamped the pattern using Magno nails plate O, and China Glaze Passion. I decorated the tips with Different Dimention Penny!!!, one of my favorite copper glitters. :)

There you have my 'W'! Hopefully I'll have my 'X' up within a few days because I'm lagging a little bit on the challenge...:/

Thanks for looking. Xoxox,
M.

Before & After: Cosmic Snowflakes

Hello!

Thanks to my move, I find myself a bit behind on things again. The week I'm on right now in my Let It Snow! challenge is 'Winter Wonderland'. I'm really excited about this one and I've been waiting for it!

A while back, I showed you this gorgeous polish, Cosmic Bubbles by InDecisive Polish:

This is a breath-taking combination of deep blue jelly and multi-sized white glitters. I told you at the time that it reminded me of a special snow experience I had, so of course it was a no-brainer that I had to do a snowflake manicure. :) I stamped on it using Magno plate M and Konad White special polish. First I did a middle mani, with just the middle nails decorated:

Then I decided to see what it would look like on all of the nails:

What do you think? I love it both ways and can't decide. And I love how the plates with bigger images give you flexibility to put a somewhat different image on each nail. :)

Thanks for taking a look! Please check out the other Winter Wonderland manicures, linked below. :)

Xoxox,
M.

Review: Micro Beads and BO 13 Polish from Born Pretty Store

Hello!!

I have some artwork and product I'm really excited to show you today. Born Pretty Store recently contacted me to pick out one of their polishes and one of their nail art supplies to review. I've been dying to try micro-beads for a while now, and never got around to it, so this was the perfect time!

First I'll show you the polish, then I'll show you some nail art I did with the microbeads. :)

The polish I chose is an icy-olive shade with a foil-metallic finish, BO 13:

Born Pretty Store polish BO 13

The polish was very thick when I got it, and I added some polish thinner to it. It remained thick, and application was a little tricky, but not bad. This is one coat of the polish, and it's fully opaque, which is always a plus for me. Also, when I saw that it was a bit thick, I decided to try stamping with it, and it turns out to be an excellent polish for stamping! I'll show you that below.

Next I wanted to try some nail art with the micro-beads. Here is the set I picked, it comes in cute little pots that make it easier to keep the beads separate than those nail-art wheels; this is the picture from the Born Pretty Store site:

Since Christmas season has officially kicked off, I decided to do some little Christmas trees on my nails. I stamped one of the Christmas trees from the new Bunny Nails HD plate series, using China Glaze Holly-Day. Then I put micro-beads on the trees for ornaments, and finished off with a rhinestone star on the top of each tree:

Micro-bead trees!

I didn't have any bleeding with these micro-beads like you get with some of the craft store beads, and when I applied them and covered them with Seche Vite, they stayed put until I took them off a day later. :)

I also wanted to try stamping with BO 13, so I did a second manicure to test this out, and to work with the micro-beads again. This time I started with a base of Dandy Nails Hands Of Time (Indie Alert!), a gorgeous blue polish with blue-green glitters and shimmers to it. Then I stamped using Magno Nails plate O (which I will be reviewing for you soon), and BO 13 as the stamping polish. Then I added some olive green micro-beads to give the design extra dimension:

Dandy Nails Hands of Time + BO 13 + micro-beads

Ugh, chipped the nail on my middle finger a bit...sigh...

The polished stamped like a dream, was perfection to work with as a stamping polish, and looked perfect. :)

This is one of those manicures that exceeded my expectations; I loved it and didn't want to take it off. I love the way the micro-beads work with the glitters in the polish, they complement each other beautifully, and the icy-olive circles give the whole thing a sort of surreal underwater feel. This was an A+ manicure in my opinion, the micro-beads just pushed it over into very cool.

As far as usability, it took me less than 5 minutes to apply the micro-beads to this manicure, very reasonable I think. The Christmas trees were closer to 15 because there were so many beads and they were all so close together. And again with this mani, the beads stayed put until I took them off the next day.

You can find the BO 13 polish by clicking here.
You can find the micro-beads by clicking here.

Also, if you use code MCL91, they've been nice enough to give readers of my blog 10% off of your entire order. Their prices are already low, this makes it even better. :)

Born Pretty Store

Thanks for taking a look! I'll have another manicure featuring micro-beads for you tomorrow. I'm sort of addicted to them now...

Xoxox,
M.

(the products in this review were sent for my honest opinion.)

Review: Magno Nails Plate M

Hello!

Today I have a stunning stamping plate to show you.

For a long time I've been eyeing the gorgeous plates over on the Magno Nails site. I'm in love with their designs, but was hesitant to take the risk of buying from an overseas company I didn't know much about. What if the quality was bad, would I be able to exchange or return it without it costing an arm and a leg? What about having something shipped that far, how would the company deal with it if something went wrong? But finally I couldn't stand the plate-lust anymore, and I took the plunge, and ordered two plates.

I'm really glad I did! Not only are the plates of top notch quality, but it was just silly of me to worry about buying from them. As it turns out, the *United States* post office lost my package, and when I wrote to Magno Nails to figure out what had gone wrong, the owner went to her German post office *that* day and filed a complaint. I don't know what all exactly happened, but they found my package and I got it two days later. She was on top of thing, she was very polite, and she even sent me a free gift to apologize for the problem! Amazing. I wish all companies had customer service like that.

Of course, what's most important is the quality of the plates, and these are top-notch. The etching quality matches the best I've seen in Konad, MASH, and elsewhere, and the plates stamp like a dream. And the designs...the designs are different from most of what I've seen before, and that's what made me lust after them in the first place. I have them here in still shots, and have a video I made of the plate if you prefer to see it that way; you can find it by clicking here. On with the images!:

I love the ones on the bottom left here; and how about those seaweed looking ones!

Love those leafy vines at the bottom right

Such pretty flowers...

Love the honeycombs!!

Snowflakes and diamonds!

Circles of circles...

For the cow lovers out there :)

I love those trees!!

The size of these images is very useable, even if you have longer/wider nails. Here I have a sneek peek of the other plate I bought, with a standard Konad plate. You can see that these images are a fair amount wider and longer. So if you struggle a bit with the size of some other brands, these should work better for you:

To sum up, these plates are excellent quality and stamp like a dream. The exact price changes a bit depending on the exact exchange rate, but when I bought mine they were right around $20 per XL plate. They also have some smaller plates in their stamping section, too. With such a quality product and such incredible customer service, I'll definitely be buying from them again.

I hope this was helpful for you! Thanks for looking. :)

Xoxox,
M.

(The plates in this review were paid for with my own money.)

Before & After (& After): Leafy Leafy Leafy!

Hello!!

Today I'm going to take a break from Halloween, and show you a fall manicure. Sadly, Halloween still managed to seep out of my subconscious, because I'm holding a bottle of Halloween glitter in my hand instead of the actual glitter that I used! I didn't realize it until it was too late...::sighs::

I started off with a base coat of Barielle Lily Of The Valley, a very pretty grass-green polish which I wore for a day (and forgot to take a picture of--yep, I'm really on top of things in this post!). Then I put a coat of Hit Polish Autumn Harvest over it:

Barielle Lily Of The Valley with Hit Polish Autumn Harvest (pay no attention to that bottle)

Okay, fine, that bottle contains Hit Polish Halloween, if you like it and want to know...:)

I love the colors in Autumn Harvest, they remind me of the changing . This is a clear-based glitter, but I don't think I'd classify it as a 'glitter bomb'--it's clearly meant to be layered over another polish, and the mix of colors and sizes of glitter makes it a solid, pleasant fall go-to glitter for me. :)

For my third day wearing it, I wanted to stamp over it in a way that picked up on the fall theme:

I used Magno Nails Plate O (which I will be reviewing for you soon!), and Pure Ice Silver Mercedes.

I wish I'd taken a picture from farther away because while it looks a bit busy in this picture, it actually looks very nice when you see it on the whole hand--it blends a bit. Regardless, I really like the colors together, and  love the fall feel of it. :)

Thanks for looking!

Xoxox,
M.