I mentioned a little while ago that I had ordered new stamping plates – they’re already here and I love them!  I haven’t found an official name for this range of plates – they’re A5 “Jumbo” plates that I’ve also seen sold by Cheeky on Amazon and at Magnonails.de.  Each plate is labelled with a letter and contains between 42 full nail designs to about 80 smaller designs.  Now I couldn’t get all the designs I wanted from Amazon and I couldn’t afford them from Magnonails.de (where they’re about AU$20 a plate) so I kept searching and came across DHGate.com, which is a Chinese wholesale site that is similar to ebay.  I found a seller here selling the A-K plate range (they go up to O) for $100 – thats 11 plates instead of the 5 I could get from Magnonails and it included all the designs I wanted.  I won’t deny I was dubious about it all, but as I could pay through paypal I decided to bite the bullet and try it and I’m so pleased I did.

I’ve grabbed the graphic versions of the plates for you to see as the plates are too reflective to get good individual photos of.  Click on the thumbnails to see the full sized images

I have to say the service was excellent – I placed my order on the 31st March and settled in for a wait – usually post from Hong Kong takes about 3 weeks so I was ready to not get these for a while as it was free shipping.  The week after I placed my order there was a three day holiday in China, so there was one delay, then of course we had two public holidays for Easter here, there is another delay for postage processing.  My plates were delivered by DHL on Thursday (the one day I wasn’t in my office to receive them ironically), I was absolutely floored – free shipping = DHL plus I had paid less than AU$10 a plate.  Now just to make it clear – these plates don’t have any backing on them like the Magnonails versions, a couple of them don’t lie quite flat and I have found three images that have some damage to them which ruins the pattern.  I can live with that.  I did some quick tests of the different styles of stamps on my current manicure and the image quality is excellent (base colour is OPI Did You Ear About Van Gogh?).  Just to be warned, these were just tests so the clean up isn’t great and there is cotton wool lint all over the place!

I started off with some full nail designs (which are huge by the way, probably about 50% larger than Konad or BundleMonster which is good and bad at the same time – no issue covering the whole nail, but no way I’m ever going to fit a whole design on my nails instead which is sad as some of the full nail designs really beg to have the whole image stamped).  Any missing parts of the stamping was my lousy stamping skills, not the plates.  I can’t get over how intricate the designs are on my pinky and pointer nails are and yet they stamped perfectly.

Sorry for the lousy pic here – not used to photographing my non swatching hand but I needed more nails to test on!  At this point I was over the clean up from the black konad polish so I switched to green.  Again flawless detail on most of them – can you see how tiny those dots are on my pinky?  I had some trouble with the vine design and I smudged the spirograph stamp a bit but overall great quality.

One last thing I really like is that all the plates are hole punched so I can keep them in a binder – US based readers this isn’t so great for you because there are only two holes and I know you all have 3 ring binders there.  I’m now on the hunt for an A5 binder to keep them in.  I can’t wait to get these designs off my nails and do a proper manicure with the new plates now. The only problem will be which design/s to pick first.

For those of you interested – here are the links to buy the plates – I bought mine in two separate bundles which was cheaper than the whole range bundle (work that one out?!)

A-E Stamping Plate Set – US$45.60

F-K Stamping Plate Set – US$54.72