A while back on the Nail Artists United blog, there was mention of something called "soft stamping" with a link, so I checked it out. I found a specific product the term referred to, ENAS nail art stamps. I'll tell you more about the acquisition of them at the end.
The information on these is pretty slim. I found one meaning of ENAS, which is European Nail Artist Society, which seems unrelated. There's also a site under construction for easynailartstamp.com for these, so that may be it. The company producing them is in South Korea, and all I could really find on that was some evil that an online translator had done to them when they put a profile on an import/export site, which tells us "in the nearer future we are sure that ENAS will become the best No.1 for Stamping Nail in the world." Well, I wanted in on the ground floor of the best number one for stamping nail in the world, so I got a couple.
They work on the same idea as Konad, but done completely differently. I have no idea what to call the actual ENAS thing, so I'm just calling it a stamp. I took pictures because that's easier than yapping about it.
This is the back of the stamp which has little multicolored pictures of the stamps it will make. From the back, it looks like the lid to a decorative little tin.
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| ENAS Nail Art Stamp A29, Back View |
On the front are the images, which unlike Konad are reversed, and you can see that it's made of silicone (well, you can guess that from the picture and I'll tell you that's true). It came out of the package a little linty, but that's no big deal.
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| ENAS Nail Art Stamp A29, Front View |
Just to give you a sense of its size, here's a profile.
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| ENAS Nail Art Stamp A29, Side View |
1. Paint the design just like for Konad
2. Stamp it kind of lightly on paper to remove the excess
3. Scrape off any excess polish outside the pattern
4. Stamp the whole thing directly on the nail (here's where the pattern is reversed once, while Konad's is reversed twice - once on the stamper, again on the nail).
I can do Konad, I should be able to do this, right? Wrong. I went at the rainbow first, had a really grand scale failure, demoted myself to using the ribbon-y pattern with only two colors, and another failure. At this point, it was me against the stamp, and I wasn't going to walk away without one, so I went for a super easy one and got a marginal stamp out of it. I used Konad polish to make it easier, but I'd forgotten what a nightmare the learning curve on something like this is.
For the record, I'll show you the lame-o picture I took of my one pathetic stamp, just because I'm sure if I looked back at my first Konad posts, I'd bet they're about the same (but I was too afraid to go look!).
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| ENAS Nail Stamp A29 on the Nail |
I mentioned acquisition at the beginning. I got some on ebay, a Korean guy had a ton. I went to leave him positive feedback, and I'll be danged if ebay didn't pull every one of the sales of these stamps! I hunted online for a US source, and no luck (that's where I got the import/export quote, hunting). I'd wager it's a distribution issue, and with OPI and some others throwing their weight around about use of their logos, I think ebay's jumpy about removing things. As a result, I know of no US source.
I started a rant here about the antiquated distribution system for this stuff, but heck,I got bored writing it, I'm sure you'd tip over with boredom reading it, so I stopped. It's sufficient to say that the illogical, artificial distribution rules and regulations drive me mad.
So that's ENAS nail stamping in a nutshell, tragic though the outcome was. I'm hoping to improve soon! Until next time, love and nail polish to you! 
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