Pet'la Nail Art Stamping Plates Review

Hey stamparellas,

How is everyone today? For those that haven't been paying attention I have been lavishing my love onto a recent brand of plates I discovered - Pet'la Plate. The Hungarian indie brand with the brass gold tone plates that stole my heart!  Today I have a review for you of most of the plates she has released to date including the one of the limited editions that is no longer in production.   It's also important to note that all the plates from the Summer 2014 Collection were produced with shallower etching than the first 9 plates I will review.  I will be sure to remind you because it''s an important distinction.  As usual for these things I cover the brand, the full image sizes, swatches, etc so if you are interested in a particular section feel free to scroll through and as always comments and feedback are appreciated :) Now let's get this party started!

Pet'la Plate

Pet'la Plate is the first stamping company of it's kind to come out of Hungary.  Its run by the insanely sweet, hardworking, and imaginative Petra.  She slowly created this company and the designs out of a love for nail art and with friends that shared her passion.  Thus far she has released around roughly 20 or so plates give or take a few limited editions an re-vamps.

The Plates

Each plate is made from gold toned brass as I mentioned earlier  The plates don't come with any external film that requires removal or sleeves.  They are also backless and essentially arrive to you ready to stamp. I have also included a special section in this post on how best to care for your brass plates since brass can become oxidized over time.  The oxidation is normal and can be removed with a bit of brass cleaner.  Of note the first 9 plates for this review were intentionally etched deeper so that they would take longer for the polishes to dry in the wells in order to aide beginner stampers.  The next plates from the Summer 2014 Collection were etched to be much more shallow to prevent flooding which resulted from the deeper etching which you can see below in the swatches.

Caring for you Pet'la Plates

Because these plates are constructed from brass instead of the traditional stainless steel we are used to seeing with stamping plates they require a different type of care to maintain their unique finish.This isn't a maintenance that is required with every use but only an occasional sort of thing to wen you noticed oxidation on the plate.  Sometimes the plates will arrive with a reddish undertone along the edge of where the designs are etched (you can see this really well on the Golden Russian plate below).  This reddish tone or darker edge is normal and does not effect the function of the plate however it can be removed with simple brass cleaner or a soft nail buffer NOT a file.   This will also keep the brass looking shiny and new since it has a tendency to dull over time as a latent property of the metal.  Also as an FYI you can still use acetone or regular nail polish remover on these plates without causing any harm to them.

Summer 2014

Full Nail Image Size Comparison

The images to vary a bit as you can but the full sized images for these plates measure 2.4 x 2.0 cm length by width. These images are large.  If you have longer nails I doubt you'd have to worry about these images falling short of your length.  Obviously for those images that are expanded there is even more space to work with.  I think shorter nail lades will still be able to get a lot of of these plates as well.  Below are the usual brand comparisons I post with the reviews.

MoYou London Plate Pro 08 (non-XL) - 1.5 x 1.3 cm
MoYou London Plates  Explorer 10 (XL) - 2.2 x 1.6 cm
Bunny Nails HD B -  2.0  x 2.5cm
MJ Plate VIII - 1.7 x 2.2cm
Fab Ur Nails Fun 2 - 1.7x 2.2 cm
Vivid Lacquer 007 - 2.0 x 2.0 cm 
Cheeky Jumbo 2013 - 1.5 x 2.0 cm
Bundle Monster CYO - 1.7 x 1.9 cm
Cici & Sisi - 1.5 x 2.0 cm

The Images

As with all my reviews when swatching out the images I used Wet N' Wild Black Creme and my gold standard XL marshmallow stamper from Bunny Nails (3 years prior) or as in this case my marshmallow stamper from Magno Nails.  I only switch to Konad Special Stamping polish or Mundo de Unas in the event I am unable to pick up an image.  For these plates because of their design with deeper etching I actually found it was not possible to use MdU or Konad polishes secondary to the plate flooding and the polishes not drying fast enough to reduce that issue.  This was particularly true of MdU which is rather slow drying compared to other stamping polish brands.  You can see a comparison of several brands in the initial swatches.

In general as you can see from the swatches the problem with these plates is that the etching on these plates is too deep and results in images flooding.  What do I mean by flooding? When the polish is applied to the etched images and scraped away because the wells that hold the ink are very deep when you apply the stamper to the scraped image the excess polish spills over obscuring and smearing the image.  This was particularly apparent on plates that had more negative space i.e. plates that had a lot of etchings to produce an image.  The images that were composed of fine lines tended to be those plates that had clean image transfer.

Of note anywhere you see the abbreviations NT and NP this means that I used no tricks and no pauses to swatch the images.

In order to combat this issue I tried troubleshooting my plates using several methods.  First, because Petra said the plates were etched deeply with intention for the first releases I tried pausing for 15 seconds after scraping away the polish to let the polish dry up a bit before transferring it to stamper.  I had moderate success wit this strategy across both releases.  I also tried scraping the image and then blowing on it softly for about 5 seconds prior to transferring it to the stamper.  I also had some mild success with this strategy.  In some cases I increased the amount of time I allowed the polish to dry in the wells to see if that would help.  At times it did, but in other cases it resulted in the polish drying too much and not allowing a complete transfer of the image.

Final Impression

I will be honest and say I really love the designs on these plates.  They are some of the most beautiful and unique in my collection.  I also love that these plates are gold toned because they really stand out in my collection.  However, these plates are not for beginners at stamping.  They were challenging even for myself and I have been stamping for over 8 years.  The first 6 plates I got were etched far too deeply 2-3 plates did not actually produce usable images.  I was pretty disappointed and so I will be contacting Petra to resolve this.  The newer Summer 2014 plates were etched to be shallower than the first set and so I had more plates of this collection that were etched flawlessly - Oorie, 7 Sins, OmNomNom, and Puzzles.  However once again there were several plates that were etched too deeply which resulted in images flooding despite the use of tricks such as pauses to produce an image that did not flood.

Overall I want to give this brand a 10/10 for innovation, but in terms of quality of etching several of these plates fall below the benchmark of acceptable even using tricks in my arsenal to get them to stamp.  I've said this before, but sometimes new brands go through a few hiccups before they perfect their craft and are able to produce perfect plates.   And certainly you have seen brands bounce back from these issues in subsequent reviews here on this blog. I hope that's the case for these plates too.

The most important  factors I look for when purchasing plates is innovation in terms of images followed closely and almost equally by quality of etching and the plates as a whole.  Finally, I look at affordability and ease of access along with customer service.  Pet'la is fantastic in most categories save the quality of the etching which is hit or miss depending on the plate.  I think in time this will improve and of course I will be doing follow up reviews if/when I get replacement plates to see how they stamp. I always give the benefit of the doubt and I have a lot of faith in Petra because I know she is passionate about her stamping plates as much as I am. In addition, for several of these images I do feel its worth the extra effort while stamping to produce a image because they are so novel.   You can find Pet'la Plates here.  They retail for roughly $10.65 USD and ship internationally at reasonable rates.  I hope this review was helpful and please leave me a few comments and feedback.  Despite the fact that a few plates didn't work I'm excited to try these out and create some beautiful nail art with these plates so please stay tuned for that.  Thanks for reading and I'll see you next post...

These plates were purchased by me for personal use.  For further questions please see my disclosures policy.