Real vs. Fake Stamps

Hi everyone!

I attempted to film a video, twice, but technology is not on my side today hahaha. So blog post it is! I wanted to warn everyone about FAKE STAMPS. As you are shopping this holiday season for crafting supplies for the budding or seasoned crafter in your life, if you are like me, you want a good deal. Well, the saying is true: if the deal is too good to be true, it probably is. 

I unintentionally bought a fake stamp set from a destash group (where people sell their unwanted stamps and dies from their craft stash, so a lot of times you can get good deals). And the seller unintentionally sold me the fake set. She had purchased a big lot of stamps and was selling off stamps she didn't want... but she didn't realize it was fake. Everything has been resolved (she kindly refunded my money) but now I have a fake stamp set. And now I can share with all of you what I learned about the differences between stamps made by reputable companies and counterfeit stamps.

Here are two stamp sets. They are from a small stamp company based in the UK called Clearly Besotted. The set on the left with the hugging animals is the real set (called Just the Two of Us). The set on the right with the animals and balloon are the fake ones. They look the same as CB's Balloon Bunch Buddies.

Right when I opened the Balloon Bunch Buddies and started peeling the stamps off the packaging, I noticed right away that they felt different from other stamps. They were more pliable and squishy. They also had a weird matte feel to them. Real photopolymer stamps are sticky and not as bendy. I like to compare the squishy texture of the stamps to gummy bears. The small Haribo gummy bears (like the little packs you get at Halloween) or Black Forest gummy bears are a little hard but still chewy. The gummy bears you buy from the bulk bins at Sprouts market have the squishy soft feeling like the fake stamps. I hope that made sense. But please don't bite your stamps.... 

Fake squishy stamps

Real stamps, definitely not squishy

So I tested the stamp sets and noticed other differences between the two. 

I stamped the above images once, no re-inking. The koala, bunny, and hippo were stamped with my stamping platform while the hedgehogs, fox, and squirrel were stamped with an acrylic block. If you look closely at these images, you will notice that the koala image has very crisp and clean lines. The rest of the images have very uneven, blotchy lines. There is even a bit missing from the right side of the hedgehog; I stamped him twice because I thought I messed up. Nope, it's the stamp. In the image below, there are two die cut images of a bunny and hippo. Those images I actually stamped 3 or 4 times so the lines are darker, but they are still very uneven.

Speaking of die cut images, my next test was die cutting out the images. I did a test with the bunny and hippo and lined them up the same way I line up dies from other stamp sets.  As you can see in my picture above, the images fit very nicely in the opening, but after cutting them out, you can see in the image above that there is an uneven white border around the image. I took a closer look at the dies and noticed it had an uneven cutting edge. The margin next to the cutting edge is supposed to be even so that you will have a nice border around. The dies from this fake set are not of the same quality as the real deal. You can see the uneven margin especially in the hippo die on the bottom.

EDIT: Another thing that should have screamed fake was the fact that these stamps came with dies. The actual stamps from Clearly Besotted do NOT have coordinating dies.

One more note is that there are a lot of cheap stamp sets out there, and you may want to buy them off Amazon or eBay. But they usually will have a big difference in quality. You can definitely try a cheaper set and see how the quality is, especially if you are just starting this hobby and just want to get your feet wet. But if you do invest in this hobby, then I recommend investing in quality stamps so that you get the best experience. You can go cheaper on other things (like embellishments, envelopes, and sometimes even paper) but go for the good stamps.

So there you have it. Real vs. Fake. I'm not an expert but this was my experience. How can you tell real from fake? Know what is real! Then you can tell what is fake! True for stamps, true for life. :)

Bottom line: Crafting is an expensive hobby but still try to buy the real deal because it's better quality! And counterfeit products are illegal too so.... yeah, there's that. Please support the legit crafting companies! (Many are small businesses, like the stamp company I mentioned, Clearly Besotted.)

Happy crafting!