*these products were provided to me by MoYou London for review
My nails are long at times so the sizing of nail stamping images is crucial to me. I’m happy to show you a plate today that’s perfect for long nails! It’s called MoYou Pro Plate Collection – 05 XL. It’s important to know that there are two versions of this plate. The original plate and the new-fandangled XL plate. From what I hear, customers were asking for larger designs which prompted MoYou to re-create some of their products. Hence, my pro plate XL was born! I also chose to try out their large size stamper and scraper set since it was designed to work great with the XL plates.
Let’s look at the large size stamp & scraper set first. It comes with two plastic scrapers. This is new for me since I’m used to using metal scrapers which seem to scratch up the surface of my plates. I really like the idea of plastic scrapers instead. →UPDATE 5 months after writing this review: I never use the plastic scrapers anymore. My old metal konad scrapers work better in my opinion. Yes, the metal scratches the plates, but they make for cleaner scrapes.
As for the stamper, it’s two-sided. The small pink side is hard which is good for small intricate stamps. Whereas the large white end is nice and big and squishy. It’s definitely a lot larger, softer, stickier and more cushy than my old trusty Konad stamper. In fact, it’s so sticky you can see some fuzz and cat hair stuck to the stamper in my pics. This initially annoyed me a lot. But after cleaning it with an acetone soaked pad I found that any little residual pieces of fuzz did not deter from the stamping quality. I will have to get over the fact that the squishy end is hard to clean all the way. BUT, on the bright side, it grabbed the designs off my XL plate like a real champ! You won’t have to press down hard to pick up the design, or to transfer it to your nails. This is handy for two reasons: 1 its less effort and 2 you can stamp on top of a base color that isn’t necessarily dry yet! I tried two different manicures with this plate and stamper and both had two coats of color that were not entirely dry… but no worries. The nice squishy stamper dropped the design onto my nail with ease. Usually with my Konad stamper I have to press real hard to get the design to hit the far edges of my very curved nails… and when you press hard like that you hafta make sure that your base color is dry or else the mani will get all flubbed up. Well, with my large MoYou stamper I barely applied any pressure, the design reached all areas of my nail with ease, and my still-wet base colors were unharmed. One thing to note- save the big squishy end of the MoYou stamper for large designs, and use the small end for smaller designs. I had better luck that way since the big end didn’t transfer tiny designs well. Overall, I’m very happy to have this new large size stamper. It is my go-to stamper for full-nail designs now. Don’t press hard and you’ll see it works well.
Moving on to my Pro Plate 05 XL. It comes wrapped in a plastic sleeve and has the typical blue peel-off film to protect the surface. I really love the designs on this one. They are well etched and sufficiently large enough for long or wide nails. I measured them to be 15mm x 21mm which is bigger than any other brand plate that I own (see my size comparison of other brands right here). Each plate also has a hard plastic base attached to the back of it which makes it feel nice and sturdy and gives the plate nice smooth corners. Shown below is pro plate 05 XL before I removed the packaging.
You can see that this #05 plate gives you 12 XL images. The comparable non-XL plate is labeled #03 and has 18 designs on it. So by choosing the XL you lose a few images, but if they fit your nails better then it’s probably worth it.
So are you ready to see my first attempt at MoYou stamping?
It’s a mixmatch/skittles mani so you can see some of the different stamps from the plate. I really like using a cream base with a shimmery stamp, or a shimmer base with a cream stamp just to pump up the level of contrast a little bit. I think the peacock nail may be my fave. I applied two different blue Butter Londons to that design and when I scraped it off they blended a little bit, but for the most part it worked well to create two different colored feathers. As for the other nails, the green snakeskin was stamped on using Sinful Colors magnetic nail polish, and the zebra was stamped with black konad polish. All of the polishes I used seemed to stamp well with this plate. Since I usually stamp with Konad special polish… I was happy to see such great results using MoYou plates and regular ol’ nail lacquer.
My second manicure is a wood grain design. This wood stamp is what really excited me when I saw a pic of the plate online. I just love the idea of making my nails look like organic materials… plus, my dad is a woodworker so I have a fondness for that kinda stuff. I’ve been wearing this manicure for three days now and I just love it. The brown hues are muted so you don’t even notice the design at first glance. But if you do a double-take you’ll see the cool wood grain appear.
I used two coats of Zoya Pandora which is a nude shade and while it was still pretty tacky, I stamped some black Konad polish and regular brown polish over top. Again, I was thrilled that my wet polish didn’t get smushed by my nice new stamper. The black looked kind of stark against the nude though, so I sponged some brown over top to mute the appearance of the grain. The results are a subtle but unique manicure and I love it.
I’m thrilled with my XL pro plate. I didn’t have any issues with application and I never messed up even one of my nails. I also received another plate called Back to the 60’s -01 from the Time Traveller Collection. I will have to show that to you soon!
I’m really excited about all the plates that MoYou London carries and they keep pumping out fresh collections all the time. If you’d like to see more MoYou London goodies you can visit them online at http://www.moyou.co.uk. Just know if you buy a plate labeled as PRE-SALE or LATE SHIPPING then it will not ship til a later date. Make sure to use code SHINY20 to save a generous 20% off your cart until Nov 1st, 2013.
Craftynail 