In the effort to expand my nail horizons, as it were, I've been experimenting with gel polish recently. To that end, I found a set of UV soak-off gel polishes on eBay recently, and thought I'd give you a little swatch and review of my experience with them. This polish set contained four solid color gel polishes plus a base primer and a top gel, and I paid about £20 for the set. I was initially a bit concerned that the listing didn't say what brand the product was, so it was only upon receipt that I discovered the brand is Yichen, which I've seen in listings for acrylics monomers and polymers in the past.
As you can see from the above picture, there's no marking on the bottles anywhere to see what is inside, and you have to look on the bottom to even tell the top coat from the primer. The colors are given alphanumeric labels, which still doesn't help if you want to see at a glance what's inside. Since I don't yet own any of the swatch pop rings, I'm essentially going to have to open each of the four colors until I find the one I want. Frustrating, but not a deal-breaker. I'm also pleased that they came in hefty 15ml bottles, when a lot of gel polishes come in 9ml or smaller for double the price I paid for these.
To test the wear of the base gel, I used it for my acrygel overlays about a week ago, and so far they're holding really well with no lifting, so I'm pleased with its performance thus far.
I did swatch the colors out on my swatch sticks just to test the colors and the viscosity of the gel. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my LED lamp cured these polishes just fine, so that is definitely a bonus. All of these swatches have one coat of primer (base gel), two coats of color, and the top coat included with the kit.
Each of the colors is really quite opaque and I could have just used a single coat with no problems. The only surprise was that the listing said that I would receive a "light purple" which turned out to be a kind of lavender-leaning pink. Otherwise, the colors were all true to the listing.
As for the viscosity of these gels, I found that whereas both the primer and the top coat were very thin comparatively, the color gels were very thick - much thicker than the top or primer - but they were all very workable and self-leveled really quickly.
Overall I'm pretty pleased with my purchase. I do wish that I'd had a purple in the mix, but the pink is pretty and I'm sure I'll get some use of it. The top coat will be good if I need something really thin, and I think the primer is doing a really good job holding my overlays on. Otherwise I don't really have any complaints.
I hope you're all off to a good week! Be good, and I'll see ya Wednesday!