I purchased the Gals Princess and Fairy stamping sets a while ago, but have not gotten around to showing them to you until now. Having finally used them for the first time for
yesterday's manicure, I figured it is about time. This is also part of my bigger project to show you all the plates that I have, since I get a lot of questions about it.
Gals, a sister or sub-company of Cheeky, recently released two 25 piece sets. One is named Princess (plates GA1-25) and the other is named Fairy (plates GA26-50). Both of these have similar quality to Cheeky plates and stamp well.
I have scanned my actual plates so these are not stock photos. Click on the images to see them in full view...
Princess Set
Fairy Set
Overall I'm very pleased with the quality of these plates. They have a great variety of both geometric, girly and delicate, and small patterns. Between the two sets I had just a few small issues. In the Princess Set, my plate GA10 arrived slightly damaged and rusted making one of the images unusable. Since I ordered from Amazon, my option was to return them and reorder, but I decided it wasn't worth the hassle. In the Fairy Set, the images on plate GA44 are slightly shifted down (you can see the word "Gals" is cut off. Luckily the plate contains just smaller images all of which survived the cut. That being said, I have seen people with full size image which were cut beyond use by this type of defect. I suggest contacting either Amazon or Cheeky (depending where you purchased) for resolution if you get a damaged or defective plate plate.
All of the plates come with a protective blue cover and a paper backing to prevent cutting yourself on otherwise sharp plates. They both list the galscomsetics.com URL on the back, which is currently non-existent and not functional. The Princess Set has pink lettering...
The Fairy Set has green lettering...
Make sure to peel off the protective cover prior to using these for stamping...
Compared to the two cheeky sets, the plate size of the Gals sets is the same as the Cheeky Vibrant set (middle plate). The full size nail images are visually slightly smaller than the images on the Cheeky Vibrant set and definitely smaller than those on the larger Cheeky
Summer Set...
In my opinion, the size of the full nail stamping images is the biggest downside for these two sets. If you notice in the photo above, the Cheeky plate in the middle has rectangular full size nail images with all edges straight, while the Gals and larger Cheeky plate have a curve at the bottom of the design. This curve is thought to be there to give the option of making any full size image into a french tip design. Personally I'm not a fan of that concept.
For the larger Cheeky plates this curve is not an issue since the images are significantly larger, however, for the Gals sets which are already on the smaller side, cutting into the image is an issue. This curve takes away a valuable 2mm of pattern making the images 13 by 14 mm instead of 13 by 16 mm as they could have been...
My nails currently are 14 mm in length and are often longer. At the moment I can still use these full size images as I did for
this manicure, but it leaves me absolutely no wiggle room for error in placement unless I want to double stamp (and I really don't). As my nails get longer, I will be reaching for other plates to stamp with...
These plates do stamp well and I like the variety of images. I would definitely recommend them especially for anyone with shorter nails were the size of the full nail stamp is not an issue.
Both of these sets are available on Amazon.com and Cheeky-Beauty.com.
Have you tried or want to try either of these sets? What are your thoughts on them?
Thanks for looking!
Anutka :)
