When we were offered the chance to review this fabulous designer nail & body art studio from Character, I couldn't resist! Having already started our Christmas shopping, this is something I had looked at for my eldest daughter Abi. I have always been a fan of nail art, even as a child I would collect different polishes and stickers and would have funky nails as often as possible. As an adult I still have a large nail polish collection but have much less time to create works of art! Abi however, having recently turned 9, is at the perfect age for this set! The Shimmer 'n Sparkle Designer Nail & Body Art Studio is available to buy here for £19.99 and contains everything you need to sparkle and shimmer from head to toe:
- The nail and body art unit
- 4 vials of fine glitter
- 3 nail polishes
- 1 nail glue
- 4 body art markers
- 2 glitter gel pens
- 4 full sets of fake nails
- Adhesives for plastic nails
- 3 body art sheets
- 3 nail sticker sheets
- 140 mini gems
- Plastic tattoo stencil
- Variety of useful tools
When the set arrived I didn't have the batteries for it (the studio requires 4x AAA) so I set it up to photo and once we had bought the batteries, we got to work! Unfortunately I wasn't as thrilled with this set as much as I thought I would be! I do love the station and all the useful storage space. I really adore the vibrant pink colour and the fabulous lights in the glitter dome. But we did have some minor problems!
When drawing on tattoos, using the markers, it was hard to get the stencil images to look right as the designs are too small for the fat nibbed pens. The nail polishes were gloopy and hard to use on the plastic nails but they did work slightly better on real nails, so we used the stickers and glitter for the plastic sets! The adhesives for the fake nails work well but the tweezers for picking up the gems are absolutely useless and as fiddly as it is, we found it much easier to pick up the gems by hand. Creating glitter stickers was good fun (albeit slightly messy) and the glitter dome is a very exciting feature. The Glitter dome can be easily removed from the studio base for emptying and cleaning.
All in all, the designer nail and body art studio is a lovely little set and is ideal for older girls who have the patience and creativity like my 9 year old has! We give this set 3 stars as it isn't as great as it could be but is still a whole lot of fun and more importantly my daughter loved it, she didn't mind it's imperfections one bit. The fact it is overly pink, very girly and of course, exceptionally sparkly outweighs the minimal flaws we came across. If you would like to find out more about this glitzy designer studio, or to check out the other amazing ranges Character have to offer, here are the links:
