Lacquer or Leave Her!: Review: UberChic Beauty Sugar Skulls 01 & Halloween 01 Plates!

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Hello!

I have a two-fer for you today--I'm going to do a review of two UberChic Beauty plates that released yesterday, so you can hurry up and grab them if you want, so you don't miss out if they sell out!

I'm talkin' about UberChic Beauty's Sugar Skull 01 plate and their Halloween 01 plate--both just in time for the Halloween season and Day of the Dead (although I personally believe that sugar skulls are appropriate apparel for all the year 'round).

You know I made videos for you:

Sugar Skulls 01:

Halloween 01:

(and if you think I'm goofy in those, wait to you hear my fangirl squealing in my review of the Zombie Love plate, which will be on YouTube sometime today...)

Okay, so let's take a closer look at Sugar Skulls 01:

UberChic Beauty Sugar Skulls 01

Here's why I love this plate:

The detail on the skulls. So many different kinds, with so many different designs. Stars and hearts and diamonds and flowers. Profiles and different shapes. Skulls with tongues and flowers between their teeth and coming out of their eye sockets. So. Awesome.

The beautiful sugar-skull adorned ladies. Glamorous ladies. Rockabilly ladies. Flower-child ladies. And one uber-awesome bride.

The flowers that come along with it. Little ones, big ones, bigger ones, ones with thorny vines. Everything you need for an awesome mani.

There is so much design potential with these. So many ways you can decorate them with paint, reversed-stamping, rhinestones, studs, the foil-stamping technique on all or part of a skull, even that old flocking powder you haven't used for ages. Plus, how you make your mani can be inspired by a given skull--the one with diamonds in his eye sockets, how cool would it be to have tons of gemstones all around him?? Thinking about all the possibilities makes me feel like I'm a little girl with a ton of sparkly craft stuff in front of me and nothing else to do all day. :)

But hey! How big are them there skulls?? Let's take a look:

UberChic Beauty Sugar Skulls 01

They're fairly big; the upside of bigger skulls is that you get more of the amazing detail. Some of them will fit onto your nails without too much problem, or will fit enough--with most of the lovely ladies, their faces and some of the hair will fit onto your nail just fine. But others aren't going to fit whole onto your nails, and this is where the awesome creativity comes in! Here are some options:

Put the face of the skull onto your nail without the edges--this will make your nail itself the sugar skull.

Put only half or 2/3rds of the skull on your nail. This will capture the intricate detail and will still create a stunning effect.

Make a decal and put half of the skull on one nail, and half on the nail next to it; this will create an impressive skull working together over two nails. If you have very curvy nails like mine, you may have to have some overlapping area; by this I mean, instead of cutting the decal exactly in half, make two decals and use a little more than half of the decal on each nail so that the part that disappear on the curve doesn't make the design look funky.

My friend Jennifer suggested using the shrinking technique to shrink some of the medium-sized skulls down; I'm going to try this out and report back to see if the detail is preserved.

Create a collage effect with one main skull, and parts of other skulls appearing randomly on your other nails. This captures the cool designs and gives a funky look.

Hey! They look pretty and all, but does that detail show up on the stamped images? Yessiree:

UberChic Beauty Sugar Skulls 01 stamping test

I call that pretty good stamping, except for a little smudgy smudge cause by user error!

All in all: I see many hours of my future sitting in front of this plate, stamping and painting and decorating...

And speaking of decorating, you know what time it is? Time to start thinking about Halloween! It'll be here before you know it, and you can't go around with plain boring non-Halloween nails when it gets here! I'm pretty darn sure there are nail art laws against that. I'll look it up. ::nods::

So let's take a look at UberChic Beauty Halloween 01:

UberChic Beauty Halloween 01

Ghosties galore. Spiders supreme. Bushels of bats, and punikens a-plenty. This plate has everything you need to make a different awesome Halloween mani every day in October, if you so desired. From cute and fun to wacky and wild to spook-a-licious, You can make it happen with this plate.

(And if you're like me and you know there's gonna be days when you want something even scarier and with a touch more gore, might I suggest adding on the limited edition Zombie Love plate? I'll be reviewing that shortly, and if you like zombies, it's WAY cool.)

Let's take a look at the relative sizes:

UberChic Beauty Halloween 01

Unless you have very wide or long nails, the full-nail images will cover your nails, and unless you have very small nails, most of the single images should fit onto your nails just fine. So the only question left to answer is--how does it stamp?:

UberChic Beauty Halloween 01 stamping test

Apart from the cat hairs that snuck their way in on the skull images, these stamp well, on my very first time trying them. No fancy shenanigans or rigamaroles needed.

You can find each of these plates on sale now in UberChic Beauty's store.

I'll be back with manicures from each of these plates--until then, happy spooky stamping!
M.