Stamping Dark Roses

I bought the DRK-A stamping plate and a new XL squishy stamper and decided to play with them a bit. The concept of the squishy stamper is great… it’s supposed to be awesome for curvy nails like mine because you can just press it onto your nail and it will wrap around it.  Unfortunately I just can’t get the darn thing to work right! Most of the time it won’t pick up the images, and if it does the image isn’t fully opaque. I heard that you need to file them down and/or wipe them with acetone before using. I tried every trick that I read online and still can’t figure it out… very frustrating. This is the second one that I purchased because I thought for sure something was wrong with the first one that I bought. Anyway, after playing around with my various stampers and stamping polishes I decided that my Konad stamper still works the best, even though I have to roll the images onto my nails. So be it.

I was wearing a burgundy-colored gel polish (can you guess which one it is??? official swatches coming soon), and decided to go for a dark look by stamping a black rose pattern on top. This actually looked much cooler before I applied the top coat because the black polish dried to more of a matte finish. I wish I had taken pictures of it that way. (While I’m making wishes… I also wish for a matte gel top coat!! Anyone know of one?)

Even though I’m sharing this with you, I’m feeling kind of “meh” about it.  I don’t like how it looks with the glossy finish and I probably shouldn’t have applied the top coat over the little black gems… they look like blobs.