Mosaic Tiles - Elianto, Born Pretty stamping plate BP-L003, Born Pretty Ya Qin Au polish, Born Pretty Nail Art DIY Stamping Mat

I have new manicure things to play with, which quite delights me! Have you all have tried out a silicone nail art mat? This is the first time I'm experimenting with one, and I'm quite liking it so far.

[Pretty, pretty packaging!]

Here, I have a stamping plate and a silicone stamping mat to review. The silicone stamping mat is kept in a plastic packaging and they're both rolled up inside the sturdy tube.

The tube is a pretty good protection for the silicone stamping mat, but I was worried it would result in the mat being bent in one way or the other from its prolonged time rolled up. But the mat is actually a lot softer and more flexible than I realised, and it lies completely flat when unrolled.

[Born Pretty nail art DIY stamping mat]

This is one of Born Pretty's smaller silicone stamping mat, which is 21cm by 15cm in size. As you can see, the mat itself is rather basic, with five nail outlines on each side, in clear and in black, depending on what colour you plan to use on it. The mat itself is semi-transparent, so you can get a vague impression of how the mani will look if you peek at the underside of the mat while you're working with nail polish on the top surface.

[Born Pretty silicone stamping mat]

So, I started by painting over the nail outlines with my clear topcoat. Your first layer on the mat will be your topmost layer when you apply the homemade decals to your nails. As you can see, I did an extra five patches so I could do all ten nails at once. You don't really need the outlines to be honest.

The topcoat does cause the mat to curl up as it's drying. This is temporary and the mat goes back to being flat once all nail polish is removed. I also got distracted and wandered off to do something else for several minutes so by the time I came back, the topcoat was so dry, they were starting to peel off from the mat, as you can see from the photo above. Oops...

[Born Pretty Stamping Plate BP-L003]

I forgot to actually take a photo of the mat once I stamped on it. =_= What a dumb mistake... So in its place, you can have a look at stamping plate BP-L003 instead. The stamping pattern I chose is on the first row, first pattern from the right, and I used a Ya Qin Au stamping nail polish, an unnamed dark teal shade from Born Pretty.

If you look at the photo below, you can see that there's mostly no nail polish outside the areas where I painted the topcoat, which is unusual (for me anyway) when I'm stamping. Usually the stamping goes beyond the intended area of stamping because the pattern on the rubber stamp tends to be bigger than my nails, to ensure full coverage. But in this case, I'm stamping onto a silicone mat and nail polish from the rubber stamp doesn't adhere well to the mat directly. It adheres well to other (dried) nail polish, which is why you need to use a coat of clear polish before you start stamping. Also, you don't have a coat of nail polish as a base, I'm not sure you could lift the stamped pattern up completely from the mat.

[Stamped and hand painted on Born Pretty silicone stamping mat]

In the photo above, the decals are basically done. You can't see the stamped pattern very clearly in the photo above, because I've mostly painted over them with coloured nail polish, to create a mosaic look. I have used nail polish Elianto S02 (a green creme), an unnamed blue creme from Elianto as well, and an unnamed Born Pretty stamping nail polish of a dull fuchsia shade. I basically used whatever I had close at hand at that moment and most nail polish will work for this. But I don't actually recommend painting using stamping nail polish as they tend to be very thick and get too gloopy too quickly.

[Base: Elianto S02, unnamed Elianto blue, unnamed Born Pretty fuchsia
Stamping: Born Pretty's Ya Qin Au unnamed polish, Born Pretty BP-L003]

I think I achieved a rather nice and colourful mosaic look here.

[Base: Elianto S02, unnamed Elianto blue, unnamed Born Pretty fuchsia
Stamping: Born Pretty's Ya Qin Au unnamed polish, Born Pretty BP-L003]

I could have coloured in two colours and used the third colour as a base on my nails, to achieve the same result. I kind of just thought about it now, oops... I painted my usual clear base nail polish and then transferred the homemade decal to my nails before the base completely dried out. As the decals were larger than my nails, I did have to cut them where necessary and remove excess with nail polish remover on a cotton bud. Once all of this homemade decals were shaped to size, I painted over them with my quick dry top coat, to provide a nice glossy look and ensure the decals stay on.

So let's talk about my thoughts about using the silicone mat for stamping and colouring in...

First: The Name

I actually prefer calling this a silicone nail art mat rather than a nail art DIY stamping mat. While I have demonstrated stamping and then colouring in the pattern, there are a lot more potentials uses with this mat that doesn't involve stamping at all. That's why I feel the name silicone nail art mat is definitely more suitable, but Born Pretty does call it a silicone stamping mat on their website and a nail art DIY stamping mat on its casing so that's the naming convention I'm using for this post.

That important part done... :P

Second: Fun on the Mat

After trying it out, I'm pretty excited about the silicone mat and I'm looking forward to experimenting with it! While I really like the result of my first decal made using the mat, I would have to say that this one took a lot longer than I expected. Painting in all those little squares and triangles was very arduous. I still really like using the mat but next time, I'm going to choose something that doesn't require me to paint in every last millimetre of the decal.

But I really can't wait to try out some interesting stamping and colour mixes, or even just other type of nail art using this mat.

Third: In the end...

I was worried about the work I needed to put into cleaning up the mat, but it's actually so easy! In one of the photos above, you can see the leftover nail polish that were in three big blobs within the outlined palette on the silicone mat. That's a lot of nail polish and on any other surface, it would have been a pain to get off.

In this case, I pushed against the blobs of nail polish from beneath the mat, and all the three blobs peeled off easily. Any specks or splatter of polish on the mat was cleaned up using a piece of sticky tape to pick them all up. So cleaning really was one of the easiest part of the day.

I have some ideas I'm interested to try out on the silicone mat now! :)


Now, if you're interested in buying some stamping plates or mats, you can use the discount below at Born Pretty.

You can find the stamping plate I reviewed here, and the silicone mat here. The silicone mat came as a set of two, and Ev will be reviewing the other one, so stay tuned!