BELLYBAND VS. ENIGMA | What is the difference?

i've never received payment from filster nor did they ask me to create this video i consider john and sarah friends but i would not say positive or negative things about any product unless i truly felt that way hey guys welcome back to my channel this week's video is about belly bands versus the enigma they have a lot of differences and that's what i'm going to mainly be talking about today but something that they do actually have in common is that both the enigma and pretty much any belly band functions entirely separately from your waistband and that's actually the major draw to belly bands and things like the enigma is and the ability to conceal carry independently from your pants so that you can wear a skirt or shorts or dress pants or basketball shorts whatever you're wearing to the gym there's lots of applications for carrying separately from your waistband and these solve that niche but one of them does a much much better job so i want to touch on safety concealment and pricing for both the enigma and belly bands in general i have to kind of niche down and talk about mainly the can-can concealment belly band because that's the one that i actually have in my hands but a lot of these things apply to pretty much all belly bands maybe you have a belly band that has a kydex insert in it that changes some of the dynamics but if you watch through the whole video you'll kind of get a better feel for belly bands versus the enigma so let's get right into talking about safety something that is important to consider is trigger protection belly bands are stretching material and most of them that i've seen you're able to actually access the trigger if you try to through the material and obviously we're not going to intentionally pull the trigger when we're actually actively carrying through that material but our fingers are not the only thing that can pull the trigger i do know of one where a man was carrying in a belly band playing with his dog he had his safety on um and his dog jumped onto his belly band and actually managed to pull the trigger through the belly band after disengaging the safety on his gun so all sorts of crazy things can happen and it's totally up to us to make sure that our trigger is entirely protected by a hard material the next thing to consider with belly bands is again it's a stretchy material and when we place a stretchy material on our body that is very mobile and then we put something that is hard and fixed into that stretchy thing that hardened fixed thing said gun is going to want to work its way in different directions as your body and the band move which ultimately especially if it has a longer muzzle can result in the gun actually flopping out of the belly band because it doesn't have retention so that's the next thing to consider is that it's a stretchy material and a stretchy material can only have so much retention to actually safely keep your firearm in there the next thing to consider is retention actually on your body there's nothing really to hold a belly band in its place the belly band that i have actually has silicone wrapped all around the inside of it to try to keep it from riding up but nonetheless it rides up again our bodies are mobile and that stretchy material wants to work its way up as we move at least that's been my experience and i know of other people who've had that experience with belly bands as well the next thing i want to mention about the safety of belly bands is that again they're extracting material so they're actually a collapsible holster which means that when you want to go to reholster you have to risk potentially flagging your support hand because you're holding that holster open in order to actually muzzle your gun in there or a lot of people tend to muzzle the actual gun in towards their body to kind of get the gun into that pocket and then weasel it down into that pocket and that's problematic for really obvious reasons we never want to point a gun at ourselves keep your gun pointed in a safe direction at all times i think that's like a rule somewhere now that we've addressed some of the safety issues that come with belly bands let's talk about the safety features that come on the enigma so the enigma is a chassis system it's not a holster i know that can be kind of confusing the holster doesn't come with the enigma so you either need to have a compatible holster already or you'll need to find a compatible holster to go with your enigma and compatible just means that it needs to have a mod wing a raven wing or a dark wing and that's for the non-light bearing enigma the light bearing enigma it requires a different wing and it actually requires a certain attachment point on the front we're talking about the normal enigma here not the light bearing enigma so because the enigma requires you to use a full kydex holster we already have some safety features here that we definitely didn't have with the belly band the kydex holster is going to adequately cover that trigger guard and keep you from being able to actually access the trigger through or around or in any way near the holster it would actually have to lose retention and come out of the holster in order for you to be able to actually access the trigger which we didn't experience when we're talking about the safety of belly bands we can actually access the trigger through that belly band material while the gun is seated in the holster the next thing i want to mention about the safety of the enigma is that it is designed to move with your body it's actually designed for movement and performance in mind and tested that way as well so we know that it's designed for movement we know that it's designed for performance it's going to move with our body and not force the gun up out of the holster in any kind of way the next safety feature i wanted to mention about the enigma is the leg leash and the leg leash isn't there exclusively for safety it's also there for other reasons but for safety it actually keeps the enigma down where it's supposed to be so that when you go to draw your gun you don't lose your holster so that's something that you can experience with belly bands like i said is they can ride up inside your waistband and the enigma doesn't actually allow that to happen because of the leg leash so that's why filster has made it fairly clear to their customers that you've got to leave that leg leash on there it's designed to work with the leg leash and once we remove it we face a whole different slew of safety issues and performance issues i'm going to link my video above about holster safety and all the things that we want to actually require out of our holsters and that's actually another place where the enigma just passes with flying colors so if you want to kind of dive in a little bit deeper on what we want to require out of our holsters go check out that video after this one so now let's move right along to the concealment portion of this video i'm going to talk to you guys about how the enigma conceals versus how belly bands conceal i think this is going to be a pretty easy one for me to address when it comes to belly bands because belly bands don't actually have any concealment features built into them it's essentially like a pocket that is designed to be worn around your waist that is separate from your pants if you put a gun in a pocket there's not anything to push up against any kind of pressure point to get the grip to tuck in or to get the top of the slide to tuck in and that's how we conceal things is by bringing it closer to our body and kind of camouflaging it against our own shapes and curves and peaks and valleys so if we don't get it to curve in and kind of suck in closer to us and grip tuck and all of those things then we're going to be struggling with concealment and i've not ever seen a belly band that actually does a good job of tucking the grip without actually sacrificing access to accomplish that now when we talk about the enigma and concealment we're talking about a product that was specifically designed to do concealment really really well the enigma actually is something that people use to accomplish really deep concealment and that means basically you have the ability to hide this gun to the point where you can lift up your shirt and there is no gun to be seen so it does concealment really really well and i want to kind of explain why that is the enigma is designed for customization so you have the ability to move the belt around to you know figure out grip tuck you can tuck the grip in really tight if you want or you can make it a little bit less aggressive you can worry about how much you want to tuck the slide into you it allows you to kind of adjust how much concealment you want to get and what kind of concealment you need with whatever specific gun you're using and something that i really really love about the enigma is that that customization that it allows you to accomplish the enigma is also infinitely adjustable so it can fit a really large array of different sizes of different people and typically one size fits all is pretty much the worst thing ever it pretty much means that it doesn't kind of almost work for a large amount of people and that's totally not the case with the enigma because the belt can actually be cut to and then burned to fit your body and the other thing that i love about the infinitely adjustable thing that the belt has going for it is that if i want to wear it up higher on my waist i just need to tighten the belt down a little bit and i can wear it up higher or loosen it and wear it down much lower so i can wear it in multiple different parts spots on my torso and i don't think that i can do that with other belly bands in fact the belly bands i purchased i've had a hard time even getting their smallest size to work for me so i love that aspect of the enigma too and that works for concealment because it lets me fit it onto different parts of my torso so this last category is about pricing and the different prices of belly bands is going to vary like crazy but i'm going to try to do my best so i did kind of like a survey over on my instagram and a lot of people actually participated in it and gave me an idea of like what different belly bands are out there and the pricing that they would spend on them so from what i could get a feel for it sounds like the cheapest thing you can get for a belly band out there is twenty dollars but something to consider there is that there's like a hundred percent guarantee that that's not going to be safe to carry in so you're gonna have to modify that to make it safe which means you'll probably want to add an entire cudex holster to that in order to make it safe so you're spending twenty dollars on the band but you're gonna need to spend at least forty dollars on a holster or a trigger card so i would say base price starts at like 40 60-ish dollars for a safe option to use and then it kind of goes up from there so i saw things going up as high as like 110 120 dollars because like i said most belly bands don't come with any kind of trigger protection and if that is an important feature to you as it should be then you're going to need to actually purchase trigger protection on top of the price of the belly band so i've seen that go up as high as 110 to 120 and the enigma weighs in at 84.99 something to consider here is if you don't already have a holster that's compatible with the enigma you're going to need to factor in the price of a holster and that can get a little bit pricey we're looking in like the 150-ish dollar range here if you're adding a holster to it and obviously that's gonna be a little bit more than a belly band but we're at the end of this video and we've gone over all of the things that belly bands tend to struggle with that the enigma absolutely excels at and if we're going to invest an extra 50-ish dollars to achieve concealment and have a safe holster that allows us to actually train with it i think that's a worthwhile investment at the end of the day the only thing that belly bands and the enigma actually have in common is that they're completely separate from your pants but the enigma excels at everything that belly bands just don't do very well and because of that i don't really see a reason to spend any amount of money on such a sub-optimal setup that comes with a belly band when you can just spend a little bit more to purchase something like the enigma that allows you to carry safely and train in and use consistently and actually conceal really well in so i hope this video was helpful for you guys and kind of deciphering the major differences between belly bands and the enigma if you feel like supporting armand styled head over to my website and pick up a couple stickers i actually have some hats coming in so if you're excited about that and you want to be up to date on that go ahead and sign up on my email waiting list and you'll get notified when those come to my shop so thanks for supporting armand styled and i'll see you guys next week so this last [Music] you

Channel: Armed and Styled

Views: 10,617

Rating: 4.9191175 out of 5

Keywords: bellyband, Concealed Carry, Womens concealed carry, bellyband with gun holster, bellyband for concealed carry, can can bellyband, enigma, PHLster, PHLster Enigma, women's holsters

Id: Ubxjpa9xvUc

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Fri May 28 2021