Eric Schoon
When you want your gadgets to stand out, there’s nothing more effective or simpler than a skin. Skins come in tons of different textures and colors for devices of all shapes and sizes, with multiple companies making it easy to deck out all your favorite gadgets. But which ones should you actually buy from?
What to Look For in a Gadget Skin
There are quite a few skin manufacturers around, and they can all offer you different things—looks, textures, etc. Here are the main things you’ll want to keep an eye on.
- Quality: Of course, this is the most important part of any skin manufacturer. Cheap skins don’t provide as much protection from scratches and may start coming off sooner rather than later. We made sure all the companies highlighted on this list produce high-quality products.
- Customization: With visual appeal being the main reason a lot of people decide to buy a skin, it’s to be expected that most websites offer plenty of choices when it comes to customizing them. This can come in the form of various textured skins to mimic stuff like wood and leather along with designs. Some companies even allow you to upload your own images to be printed on the skin.
- The Website: No one wants to use a poorly designed website. It needs to be easy to select the device you’re buying for and customize the skin for it—no question about it. Preview images are also helpful, so you can get an idea of what the skin will look like on your gear before you buy it.
- Supported Devices: While phones and mobile devices tend to the most popular when it comes to purchasing skins, why not deck out everything you own? Many sites will offer skins for products like game consoles or laptops, and even more niche stuff like drones.
High-Quality: dbrand
If you’ve heard of any of the companies on this list, then it’s probably dbrand. The company is extremely well-known throughout the tech world, and for good reason—its skins are the highest-quality around. With a large selection of devices supported—including phones, consoles, laptops, and more—you should be able to deck out all of your favorite devices with dbrand.
When it comes to choices, dbrand offers a good number of different materials and colors along with occasional limited time designs. The website is also easy to use with live-updating images of your skins, so you know exactly what you’re creating as you select your choices. If all you care about is receiving a quality product, dbrand is the best company to go with for this stuff—but other companies do provide some options dbrand is lacking in the customization department.
A Solid Contender: XtremeSkins
XtremeSkins does a good job at competing with dbrand with its high-quality skins. You’ll find skins for devices of every creed, whether that’s phones, headphones, or even drones. And the options presented when it comes to color and materials are also pretty wide reaching. You have your more standard stuff like matte colors or carbon fiber along with unique designs like “Carved Charcoal.”
This is a United Kingdom-based company as well, so if you’re in the UK or Europe, then XtremeSkins is a fantastic choice for getting your orders delivered sooner—worldwide shipping is also available.
Loads of Designs: Skinit
Skinit focuses on having loads of cool-looking designs to appease fans of everything from Marvel to Looney Tunes along with more general designs. You’ll find plenty of cool designs on the storefront, whether you’re shopping for your new PlayStation 5 or iPhone 12, and you can even upload custom images if you prefer something personal. The custom image designer even includes some tools like colored backdrops, a text-creator, and the ability to add stickers.
Textured: Gadgetshieldz
Gadgetshieldz has an impressive selection of different textures and designs for its skins, even if the selection of devices isn’t as wide as its competitors (especially in the laptop and console departments). From the sleek look and feel of the marble skins to the more common leather and wood skins, there’s plenty to fall in love with here. And, the easy-to-use customizer on the website makes Gadgetshieldz an easy recommendation if you want a large number of materials from which to choose.
Find Anything: DecalGirl
DecalGirl is an interesting website because instead of having set designs or materials, the website operates on a platform-like system. This means the skins available are designed by other users of the site, and while not all the designs are great, this opens the door to find skins based on practically anything no matter how niche. And on top of that, you can also upload your own images in case you don’t find what you’re looking for.
The list of supported devices is also monstrously long, so unless you’re sporting something particularly uncommon you should be good to go here.
