Stamping plate holder continued

So far I have found a couple of good holders for some of my plates.  Here are the working ones.

The first holder is for the small ones. I found it on Aliexpress, where it was priced around 19 dollars. It works really well and holds 240 plates. It has 20 pages that holds 12 plates each. As shown in the pictures, it holds round plates, square ones, heart-shaped and hexagon plates.

For medium sized ones I found another one on Aliexpress. It was described as being able to hold 16 plates, which I found to be perfect. I ordered two of them, and they worked well. But after some time I got more plates than one of them could hold, so I split both apart and put the pockets from one of them into the other one, so it now holds 32 plates.
At this point I have 3 free pockets, so it has gotten pretty heavy and full, but it still closes.

What is up with OPI's brushes?

During the last year or so I have gotten a lot of OPI polishes with wonky brushes. They are not from one specific vendor or anything, so it's not like they are second hand or set aside for being faulty - at least not what I know of.

I have bought many polishes that had been sold as faulty, but that was only because of scratches on the lid or bottle - they never had anything wrong with the polish or brushes.

I have saved one of the brushes by using a cuticle clipper to snip the wonky or too long hairs, so they didn't mess up my manicure, but that was when I started actually noticing the weird brushes. It has made me check all my OPIs to find the bad ones.

Here are the ones with the bad brushes:


Chiffon My Mind

I Cannoli Wear OPI

LOVE.ANGEL.MUSIC.BABY

Give Me Space

In The Clouds

The Sky's My Limit

In My Back Pocket

This photo is not too clear - it is like the others - splayed at the bottom.

Show Me Your Tips

This is the one, where I snipped off some VERY wonky hairs.

P.S.: Sorry for the weirdly sized photos, I just used the ones showing off the faults.

Stamping plate holder

I have had some trouble finding something to hold all my plates. I started out using different kinds of plastic sleeves in a big folder. It looked like this:

Baseball card sleeves for the small plates; round, hexagon and squares. I put some sort of drawer lining in each pocket, so they wouldn't slide out.

Baseball card sleeves for plates like VividLacquer. They barely fit there.

Baseball card sleeves for big round plates.

Bookmark holder sleeves for oblong plates.

Photo sleeves for big square plates.

These sleeves for oddly sized plates that didn't fit into the other ones.

It worked great for a couple of years, but eventually it was so heavy that I had trouble carrying it - especially if I wanted to find a plate with semi-wet nails. I couldn't carry it with one hand only, so my mani was in danger every time I would pick it up.
And all the sleeves were getting so heavy that they were hanging out from the folder, if I held it vertically.

I weighed it, and it was 6 kg. Maybe I'm weak, but it was too heavy for me to pick up effortlessly.

I just wanted something that worked better than this heavy folder, so I started to scour the internet for holders that would work for me.

More on that tomorrow..

Color Club Halo Hues 2015 Some swatches and comparisons

Color Club finally made a new Halo Hues collection - a much wanted collection by many. There are seven polishes and they all have a new and special cap with their new logo.

I only bought four of them, since I wasn't really attracted to the others in the collection. I bought Just my luck, Crystal Baller, Date with destiny and What's your sign?.

Since I had trouble finding swatches online, I've taken some pictures to show the polishes.
Three of them looks very similar in both sunshine and normal lighting, but in daylight the difference is much easier to see.

Here they all are in direct light from an LED lamp:

Crystal Baller, Just My Luck, What's Your Sign? and Date With Destiny

Here are some swatches of them; all 2 coats:

Crystal Baller, Just My Luck, What's Your Sign? and Date With Destiny

Here the difference is pretty hard to see.



Now I have some pictures taken in daylight (The pictures are taken on different days because of the weather, so I forgot to put them in the same order):

Just My Luck, What's Your Sign, Date With Destiny and Crystal Baller

In this picture, the difference is very clear:
- Just My Luck has a yellowy-green sheen to it
- What's Your Sign? has a copper-reddish sheen to it
- Date With Destiny has a purple sheen to it

Just My Luck, What's Your Sign? and Date With Destiny

Same three polishes - just laid out to show the difference.


Here is a picture of some of the old Halo Hues - just to compare them to the new ones.

Harp On It, Just My Luck, What's Your Sign?, Cloud Nine and Date With Destiny

Since all three of the new ones look like they are silver, I chose to compare Harp On It with them, but as I found out it wasn't that close in daylight.
I also chose Cloud Nine, because it's a light purple and it's pretty close - except it doesn't have the same kind of shift in the bottle.

Crystal Baller, Over The Moon and Blue Heaven

As seen here Crystal Baller is a different kind of blue - It's darker and much more blue, where the other two look a bit washed out.

At first I was extremely disappointed with the three silvery ones - I thought they were waaay to similar and they didn't look like they were as holographic as the old ones. To me they look much more like duochromes, since they have the shift in daylight. When I made the swatches, I found out that it's important to watch how much polish is on the brush as they tend to streak it there is too much on the brush.
The streakiness is actually why I'm still dissapointed in them - I don't like duochromes because they are so damn streaky, and these are no exception unfortunately. If you are a talented polisher you might be able to avoid streaks.

When I used Date With Destiny for a mani, my left hand looked nice, but the right hand was ridiculous. I wasn't paying enough attention to the application, so the end result was very streaky. It was hard to find out how much polish to wipe off, since it seemed like a very fine line between too little polish and flooding the nail with polish. It also seemed to get more and more gloopy as I applied it to more nails - hence why the fine line between too little and too much polish was harder to accommodate.

Date With Destiny swatch:

Swatches of all of them:

Just My Luck, What's Your Sign?, Date With Destiny and Crystal Baller

Christmas stamping plates

I love stamping, so I'm preparing for Christmas and New Years by finding and planning on ordering some plates that have pretty images.


Here are all the plates I've found so far (I'll probably be updating this as I find more):

Apipila plates can be bought here.

BundleMonster plates can be bought here or for faster delivery in Europe here.

Born Pretty plates can be bought here or on eBay.

Bunny Nail plates can be bought here.

Chez Delaney plates can be bought here.

Cici&Sisi plates can be bought here.

Both Dashica and Infinity plates can be bought here.

Jr Image plates can be bought here.

LojaBBF plates can be bought here.

Lesly plates can be bought here.

Messy Mansion plates can be bought here.

MoYou London plates can be bought here.

Nailways plates can be bought here.

Pet'la plates can be bought here.

QA plates can be bought a lot of places, just Google it.

Pueen plates can be bought here.

Sugar Bubbles plates can be bought here.

Vivid Lacquer plates can be bought here.

Winstonia plates can be bought here.