TOOLS: Born Pretty Round Silicone Mixing Mats Review

My first tools review post! On September 15th I did my very first Born Pretty haul...from their actual store lol. I started buying BP stuff off wish several months ago but got sick of being sent the wrong stuff or paying ridiculous amounts for P&P so I switched to eBay which has been 100% more reliable. The shipping is around 2-3 weeks and most of the time it's free. Score. However, I decided to go onto to the actual BP website and place an order. I ended up parting with £17 but got 21 items with that so I consider it to be great value for money.

I spent an extra £2 on tracking and it all arrived in exactly 2 weeks:

(I know it's says 25th dispatched but that's when Singapore Airmail received it). One thing I found amusing was the dispatch email from Born Pretty themselves though:

"Your order has been shipped already." I can just imagine an extra "jeez man, get off my case" added on there lol. But anyway, onto these silicone mats!

I've been wanting a silicone mat since I watched the cutepolish video on the Bliss Kiss mat and it's only £10 but it doesn't ship to the UK. Amazon US will but I just can't be bothered getting slapped with import tax (if HMRC decide to be dicks that particular day). So these are £1.50 each but I decided to buy all three colours for £3.09; bargain.

They are quite small, being 9.3cm in diameter. They have a shiny side and a matte side; I tend to use the matte side as the shiny side is great for sticking to surfaces. You can be assured that these won't move when your doing detailed work.

I've found them useful for seeing how polishes look under different base colours and some polishes once they're dry will peel right off without having to apply any top coat first.

I decided to go with a design that would need some reverse stamping so I could do some custom decals. Now I've never done this before so this was a learning curve for me. From watching other videos I knew to apply a top coat first; let it dry and then start doing the design. Then once everything was dry I applied another layer of top coat and then peeled once it had dried.

This worked perfectly first time (although my stamping and painting skills leave something to be desired...) and I was surprised to find that the shiny side of the decal would stick to the nail instantly without applying any top coat. I tried to cut it down a little but I still had trouble shaping it to my nail and the nail bed side is wonky and uneven. By the little finger though I had almost got the technique down. Instead of using acetone to melt the decal a little first, I used a cuticle stick to 'push' off the excess sticker. If you gently keep pressing down it eventually creates a clean separation. You can then use some acetone to just generally cleanup.

I still consider that particular manicure a nail fail though as it's not great but I really enjoyed reverse stamping and using the silicone mats. They really allow you to work at a much slower pace and clean up on them is so easy. You can either peel everything off, use a lint roller, use sellotape or a cotton pad and acetone. I'd still like to eventually have a larger mat, especially one with with nail outlines but right now these are great for mixing polishes or creating some cool nail decals and at basically a pound each, you can't really complain.

TOOLS: Born Pretty Round Silicone Mixing Mats Review

Polishes/Tools Used:
- Revlon // Colorstay Diamond Top Coat

- Avon Arabian Glow // Electric Green (neon green, sadly discontinued)
- Born Pretty Stamping Polish // #12 (primary green)
- Born Pretty Stamping Polish // #1787 (soft red)

- Born Pretty Stamping Polish // #333 (light blue with green undertone)