Gel Polish

Hello lovelies :)  I hope you've all had a good week, and have an even better weekend!

Sorry I've been a little quiet this week, I've been feeling migrainey, minus the headache (thank goodness), so I've just been totally exhausted!  My average bedtime has been like 9pm lol.  I'm feeling good now though, so I shall be back to regular posting!

I hope you enjoyed the guest post from Rachael this week :)  I have a series of guest posts coming up from some fab bloggers.  As it happens though, my fiance isn't actually home.  He was supposed to be home on Wednesday, but he's been delayed for a couple of weeks.  So now, instead of keeping you entertained while I'm spending time with my other half, all my lovely guest bloggers shall be keeping you entertained while I'm busy feeling sorry for myself!  And eating a lot of chocolate.  Oh well!

Anyhoo, since I haven't had a chance to do any nail art this week, I just wanted to share this gel manicure with you!

A couple of weekends ago I went home to Swansea.  The Saturday night we went round to my auntie's new house (it has a spiral staircase - amazing!) for an evening of nails and wine.  Do evenings get any better than that?  My auntie mentioned she still had the stuff for gels that she'd borrowed off her friend, so I decided to have a go!

For some reason, of all the photos I took, I decided this blurry one was the most appropriate to keep...not quite sure what I was thinking there!

These were CND polishes that I used.  For those of you who haven't tried gels before, you apply a basecoat, 2 coats of colour, then a top coat.  Each coat is cured under UV light for 3 minutes (so it's quite a lengthy process!).  When you're done, it feels tacky, but you wipe it with some magic finishing stuff, and it removes the tackiness.

Application was a lot easier than I thought it would be actually.  I was expecting the polishes to be a bit thick and unmanageable, but they weren't particularly thicker than normal polishes.  Possibly I should've used thicker coats, because these were a little patchy!  And I also had a little shrinkage on the tips, despite wrapping them, so I'm not sure where I went wrong there!

I wore these for a week (they'd grown out far too much by that point to wear them any longer!).  I...er...did manage to chip them.  But only where I broke a nail, so that's pretty good going.  Honestly, I can normally chip polish within hours of wearing it.  What I REALLY loved about this was that I could to manicures on top of it of an evening for the Black & White Challenge, remove it with non-acetone remover, and I still had painted nails underneath!  Woohoo!  For that reason alone I was considering buying myself all the stuff for gel nails.

Then there was the removal.  My oh my.  I used the foil technique, and to be fair the colour came off no problem.  But there was a clear layer left (I guess the basecoat) that just did not want to budge.  In the end I had to buff it off, as I gently wept, apologising to my nails as I went!  So that has really put me off...  Other people have said they've used the soaking technique and didn't have any problem like this, but I'm not convinced soaking my hands in acetone is a good idea.  Plus, it comes in such tiny bottles...

So yeah, I probably won't be trying gels again any time soon!  I do, however, have the Vinylux topcoat to try out, and I shall be posting my thought on that soon.

One last thing...  Tomorrow will be my first ever guest post on somebody's blog :)  And just WAIT until you see which blog it is.  Aaaargh, so excited!!  I shall be posting a link here (once I work out the time difference...) so be sure to check it out!