Nail glossary

Stamping

Transferring engraved designs onto the nail with a squishy stamper — crisp pattern, fast.

Stamping transfers an engraved design onto the nail: polish is scraped across an etched metal plate, picked up by a squishy silicone stamper, and pressed onto the nail in one motion. It is how impossibly crisp, repeating patterns — lace, leopard, geometric lines, tiny florals — appear on nails in seconds rather than the hour freehand would take.

The appeal is precision at speed; the constraint is the catalogue, since you can only stamp what a plate carries. Good stamping still takes practice — polish consistency, pickup timing and straight placement all matter — but the skill curve is far gentler than brushwork. For a design-first customer, the useful takeaway is vocabulary: if you love razor-sharp repeating pattern, “can you stamp this?” is a faster route to it than asking for freehand.

Now on the App Store

Now go design it.

Vocabulary is the map; a real set is the territory. Design your exact nails in Nailly and send them to an artist who can make them — live on the App Store for the US and Canada.