Today I have my first manicure of the year to show you and unfortunately I think it's also going to be the last one I do for awhile. My nails have been breaking horribly for over a year now so I'm making it a personal goal to leave them alone for awhile so they can have a break from all of the harsh chemicals. Of course, since my timing is always off with everything - I am now finally on Instagram! Woohoo! There's nothing there yet and obviously I won't have any polish pictures for awhile but if you'd like to follow me I'd appreciate it :)
So today I have some very cool gel polish to share with you. Banggood provided me with a gel polish to try out, but they were awesome enough to provide me with the primer and top coat which goes along with it as well. At the time I thought they were just helping to promote their products but once I tried these out, I understood!
The color polish itself is pretty unique for a gel polish because you don't have to use it as a gel. That's right. This one dries as a normal polish if used without a UV lamp. I tried both methods, simply because I was curious and the results are actually pretty cool. When used as a normal polish, it does dry in decent time. For some reason I got some bubbles when using this as a gel but not when used as a normal polish which is kind of weird. Otherwise, no problems.
(image: used as gel)
(image: used a regular)
When I used it with the gel primer and top coat, I only had to dip the brush once to cover all 5 nails. Moving on to use it with regular base coat, I had to dip the brush once per nail. Wow how cool is that? So by using it with the gel primer, you actually use less polish! It gets even better - the gel manicure actually turned out more opaque than the regular manicure! How strange is that?? I used less polish and got better coverage? Whhhhaaattt?? Yep, pretty cool! So while I think it's absolutely awesome that you can use this polish without the lamp, I don't see any reason why you should! Except, it is pretty neat you can get 2 different looks from this same polish depending on how it is used.
Now it's really important that I mention the technique for applying this polish is actually a bit different than normal. The video can be found on the product page, but here's the breakdown:
Apply 1 coat of the primer, set for 2 minutes under the lamp
Apply 1 coat of the top coat, set for 2 minutes
Apply 1 coat of the color, set for 5 minutes
Apply 1 coat of the top coat, set for 3 minutes (I had to do it for 6 minutes because it didn't seem dry to me at 3.)
So it's a bit strange using the top coat twice, and using it before the color. My boyfriend compared it to candy coating so if I think of it that way I suppose it makes sense. There must be something to this technique which reacts with the color to stretch out the paint as well, I would think. I don't know, I'm not a chemist but the result and the application was pretty neat and definitely fun to try out!
For this manicure, I decided to try out these template stickers I had gotten as part of a BPS grab bag a few months ago. I'm not crazy about the design and the stickers were kind of hard to remove from the backing. I just took one template and reused it on each nail which caused the template to actually kind of melt so the design didn't turn out true to the template but in this case I don't care! I also used this rhinestones which I got from BPS and I have no idea why I received them :P I used butter London Bluecoat with Leccy on the accent.
These polishes come in a bunch of different metallic colors. The only thing I can say about these which I don't like is that the bottles all look exactly the same and unless you can read Chinese, you'll have to go to the Web site to look at the instructions for telling the difference between the bottles! Oy vey! I labelled the plastic bags mine came in and I'm just going to keep them in those because otherwise I'll never be able to tell them apart. It's kind of strange the bottles aren't clear so you can't see the actual polish. At the same time, it's kind of neat. I just wish they were better labelled!
Check out all of the gel polish colors here. They're $3.99 for a 12 mL bottle.
The primer and top coat are $4.29 each for a 12 mL bottle.
Banggood asked me to provide you with some coupon codes, and this one is still good:
25% off Men’s Clothing Clearance — Code: BGM210(ends Feb. 27th 2015)
edit: I just want to add that this manicure only lasted 5 days before it started to chip... so not very good longevity, especially not for a gel manicure :(
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