Pearl Ex - mica powder. Pretty and shimmery and sparkly, but it contains no fixatives so you need to use it with something that will make it stick. You can add some to a travel bottle of hairspray and make a shimmer mist (not archival!); you can mix it with a little Mod Podge and paint with it; you can add some gum arabic and use it as a watercolor, and you can use it to highlight an image stamped with a glue pad or versamark (although with the versamark, you'll want to spray it with some kind of fixative as well)
Perfect Pearls: also a mica powder, but it has a fixative added. You can do the same things as with the Pearl Ex, but instead of mixing it with hairspray, you can mix it with plain water and it will still stick. You can also add a bit of water and use it as a watercolor (if you try this with plain Pearl-Ex with no gum arabic, the powder will just fall off once the water dries.) Pretty much any technique I've seen that calls for Pearl Ex will work with Perfect Pearls. Most of the sets of Perfect Pearls come with a "Perfect Medium" pad that you can use like versamark and they also come with some really nice brushes to help apply the powder. Those brushes work equally well with the Pearl-Ex
Twinkling H2O's are watercolors with mica powder added. You use them like you would use regular watercolor paints - coloring images, background washes or painted directly on the stamp and then stamping.
Help!! What's the difference?
