Review: Image Plates and Stamper from Magno Nails

Magno Nails (www.magnonails.de) is a german naildesign shop, that sells the same image plates as Chez Delaney (www.chez-delaney.com). As far as I know, both send internationally, you just have to request it at Magno Nails. They are reliable, the prices reasonable and very pleasant to deal with. I am not affiliated with them and I HAVE paid for my two orders with them myself, I just think, they do a good job and the products are fabulous!

On to the review. I ordered a good bunch of the A Series (I already owned a few of the H Series, i bought off of ebay) plates, 4 of the XL plates and the XL Stamper.

First of all, the plates (I cleaned them with nailpolishremover and now have this stuff left on there ... need to clean them properly later -.-). The XL plates are about Din A5 sized, so half the size of a piece of printing paper. They come with a thin film you have to remove first. The ones with the full nail/french tip designs (that's why the lower edge is curved) have 42! designs on them. Some are quite similar, but that is not such a big deal at the price of 15,99€ (about $23) a piece. They all work well, even the very delicate looking ones. They are pretty big (1,5cm wide and 2cm long), so there is no problem fitting them on your whole nail width-wise and with the curved edge they look good stamped only along the tips.

First I thought, I would find the big plates unwieldy, but actually, I quite like the size. They don't move around, when you scrape and with the holes in them, they are easy to store in a binder. All my other (small, round) plates are stored in small photo albums and it is kind of a hassle to get them in and out. It's easy to find images on these big plates, too, because you don't have to search through the small plates. I have ... well, let's just say a good bunch of small image plates from Konad, Bundlemonster and Magno Nails/Chez Delaney (whatever you wanna call them, I just call them Fauxnads) and looking for that ONE particular image, that would go perfectly wth the Idea in my head is not easy, when there are so many to go through, the big ones are easier to navigate.

The small plates are bigger than the Konad plates and have no plastic backing, so the edges are a wee bit sharp. Be carefull when handling them. Again, they stamp nicely, no problems even with the finer designs. The full nail/french images on both the XL and the smaller plates are too big to fit fully on the standard Konad stamper. That is not the only reason though, you should use the XL stamper, that is advertised to go with these plates. More on that later.

Both the XL and the smaller, round plates (A and H series) have a nice variety of designs. Not only floral (which is an issue to some with Konad) and some plates have mirrored versions of an image, which I think is realy cool. I LOVE the designs on these plates and since I've got them, I have rarely used other plates (Bundlemonster or Konad)

I have to say, that I use a plastic card for scraping, which to me, makes it easier to scrape lightly and prevent the scraper from digging the polish back out of the crevices of the plates. Another plus to this: no scratches on my plates! With the Konad stamper I had a few issues and had to work quickly to stamp my images, some would transfer only partially, but I have the same problem with some Konad plates. That changed completely, when I got the XL Stamper.

Seriously, this thing is MAGIC! I recommend this to EVERYONE into stamping. The pads are kinda sticky and it picks up images like nobodys business. Sadly, it picks up lint like nobodys business, too. But that is easily remedied by swiping it with some acetone or nailpolishremover or washing the pads with lukewarm water and dishsoap (not handsoap, the oils in there are not a good thing to have on a stamper). Even images I had real difficulties picking up completely transfered like a dream with this thing.

Both pads are bigger than their respective counterparts on the Konad Doublesided Stamper, so the big one fits the oversized images very well and the small one is almost big enough to comfortably fith the normal sized images on the Konad and Bundlemonster plates. I use the big stamper for all full nail designs and the small side for smaler images (which I rarely do ... just don't realy dig the look of the random little pictures on the nails)

This stamper is very squishy, which is the second part of it's magic. You don't roll the stamper over image and nail, you just plopp it down, like a regular stamp. The pads mold to your nails perfectly and transfer the image flawlessly. My nails are very curved and I used to have the problem of missing parts on the sides or images not lining up correctly, because with the old stamper I would have to wriggle it around to transfer the images fully on my nails. Not anymore, with the XL stamper. Just press it down lightly on the nail and voila, there is your image. If there was anything I would recommend to someone who is into nail stamping, I would say this stamper. It makes your live so much easier.

Now I have a few images from the plates I have, all stamped with a generic black stamping polish off of ebay.

As you can see, all, except the forth in the second row are pretty much perfect. That image is a PAIN in the booty to get right and the problem is more the scraping than the stamping.

If anyone is interested in any image stamped on paper or nails, just leave a comment. As a reference, here are all the Fauxnad plates I own:
A20 through A60
H1, 8, 11, 12, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 29
XL Plates A, B, C and D

you can look at the plates at the links at the top of this post :)

German version of this review coming up, it's just hell to translate it all :D and I realy wanted to get this up.