Hi , I have been painting my nails for just over a year now , the best polishes I have found are 516 polish , check them out , their base coat and top coats are excellent too , also look at for your nails only and prism polish
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One of us! One of us! One of us! 
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Well, that was a disappointing trip to the shops. 
Went into town today. Seeing as how I’ve got my new gel kit thingy (see above), I thought I’d treat myself to a few fancy colours in gel polish. You know: Xmas treat.
Tried Superdrug: they don’t sell gel polish at all.
OK, never mind - tried Boots: they sell a few, but frankly a really boring palette of shades and OMG how much??? 
Ended up at Just Essentials. They had a slightly wider range of colours and at much better/more sensible prices - but again, there wasn’t really anything that made me go “Oh god YES!”. I ended up buying ONE bottle of a basic red …and that was it! PleasureDrone’s big Xmas pressie to himself. Humph!
I’m guessing that if I want to find anything a bit more exciting or unusual (I’m very fond of metallic/iridescent/glittery stuff) I’ll have to order online. So help me out here, gel people: what brands or suppliers have you had good results with - what would you recommend?
And, just to be clear: I don’t care how lovely it is, I am NOT - I repeat NOT - spending £17 on one measly 10ml bottle of goop. 
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I’ve been using GDI polish on mine (£4 a bottle) and they have some super funky colours (including colour changing 
)
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Aha - now we’re talking. Thanks, Brenna. 
Do you use a particular supplier for that, or just Amazon etc.?
I generally get them from ebay (unsure how reliable this is - but my fingers haven’t fallen off yet)
They do have a website but I haven’t used it yet
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Ta - shall investigate. 
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Hi @Lovehoney_Brenna - More questions! 
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With the GDI stuff, how long do you usually set your LED lamp unit for to “bake” them?
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When my whole hand is inside the LED unit, naturally my thumbnail is off to the side and at an angle compared to the nails on the fingers. Is this an issue at all? I’m wondering whether the polish might start sliding off it before it gets baked - and also wondering whether it would be a sensible practice to do my fingers first, then paint and bake my thumb separately, so it’s facing upwards in the unit. Any thoughts?
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Generally around 2 minutes between each layer.
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It depends how much polish you put on the nail. I used to do thumbs separately to fingers (still do sometimes if the polish is particularly thick on the nail). A peel-off base coat could be a good idea while you’re practicing, that way if it goes wrong or you don’t like how it looks you can just pop it off
I use the UNT Peel-off basecoat
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Ebay tends to be a better option value for money wise with small bits like nail polish. Just make sure to check the seller has a decent rating
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I’ve been walking around with chipped nail polish for a week or more now. I feel like this is some form of graduation for me.
Oh Ian, that sounds worrying. There ought to be a 4th option when you dial 999: just say “Nail Crisis” and a team of drag queens turn up and rescue your look… 
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I’ve got my toes still painted but had to take it off my finger nails. I’m giving them a break before painting them again, they’ve gone a little yellowy
At this point I’m not sure my look can be rescued.
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Never doubt the power of queens
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Part of the reason I picked the nail colours I did were the names - how could I resist Kiss of Death and I’ve Got Issues?
As my nail tech said, they must have made those just for me black-ish and purple with awesome names!
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Hey @SexInTheCity - just an update on the recommendation of Essie for my wife for xmas!
I’ve just used them for first time and they’re amazing! Wife loves the colours and I love how well they go on! My wife just used one of her ‘cards’ i made for her at Xmas that offered a pedicure and foot massage and she was in heaven and now looks amazing in a dark metallic blue I’ll try and talk her into letting me take a photo - I think I’ve done an alright
Job!
So thx for the recommendation - although now she wants more colours!
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Awww amazing!! I’m so pleased. I love hearing how a recommendation goes so thank you for letting me know. I got a couple new Essies for Christmas too which I’m loving.
Look forward to seeing them if you decide to post (and it may give me new purchasing inspo!) - I’ve got a gift card for a shop that stocks them so I’ll be getting some new ones soon 
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Back in mid-December I mentioned that my neighbour had very kindly given me a UV/LED Gel kit for Xmas, and that I was having to wait a while for my over-buffed nails to grow out before trying it.
By Xmas day they’d grown out enough, so - having nothing better to do - I got to work, slowly and methodically, doing all the nail prep/cleaning etc. and applying the stuff.
Long story short: I did not enjoy the experience. Obviously, with any new endeavour, the first time is always stressy and bit of a steep learning curve, but OMG what a palaver! 
The biggest surprise was just how long I had to leave each coat under the LEDs to get it to set. Neither the kit itself nor the label on the gel polish (Belle Gel Rapide) made any mention of how long I should do them for, so it was all guesswork. On the first attempt I got it hopelessly wrong: they emerged still wet - so much so that they got smudged and I had to clean them off and re-do them, but even after the 2nd go I could tell they weren’t done yet, so back under they went for a 3rd exposure. I began to wonder whether the gel polish I was using was unsuited to the frequency band of UV being emitted by the LEDs.
In the end, I had to ‘bake’ each coat for about 3 minutes (which seems a lot to me), so with 1 coat of base layer, 2 coats of colour and a gloss topcoat, even without mistakes and re-tries that was easily 12 mins per hand - and that worries me. I could tell there was a fair old bit of UV energy being pumped into me too, cos every time I put my fingers under the lights they got rather warm. LEDs emit hardly any direct heat, so the heating action must have been my flesh getting “cooked” by the UV. Eek! 
Another annoyance was that the particular polish I was using was far runnier than I was expecting. It had an infuriating habit of slumping towards my cuticles and flooding them. This may just have been a poor purchasing choice, I suspect. I haven’t tried any other brands, so I’ve nothing to compare with.
The end result was… well, see for yourself: PHOTO THREAD LINK. The polish certainly hid all of the ridges in my nails, and the finish was very glossy and rock-hard - but here I came up against my next issue. This is just a personal foible of mine I guess, but I found that once the stuff was on and fully set, I felt weirdly imprisoned by it. I dunno why this possibility didn’t occur to me earlier, but the fact is I like to change my nail colours quite frequently - rarely wear anything for more than a week - and here I was, stuck with armour-plated nails, in a seriously tacky shade of red I wasn’t all that keen on. Yep… to cap it all I’d chosen a crap colour too! 
Then the biggest surprise of all: despite my careful nail-prep, it turned out the gel coat wasn’t as permanent as I’d imagined. After about 5 days it started lifting and chipping in places. So that was it: I roughened them all down with emery board, then went to my late wife’s millinery workshop, fished out her old 5 litre can of industrial-strength acetone and melted those beasties off for good!
So have I been put off UV gels forever? Pretty well, yes. I realise that another brand of polish might be easier to apply and/or better suited to my LED unit, but to be quite honest, I’m genuinely worried about repeated UV exposure and not sure I can be bothered to go through all that faff again.
Since then, I’ve been trying Sally Hansen ‘Miracle Gel’ polish and I like it a lot (I’m wearing it now) - find it far easier to use. It covers the ridges, looks convincingly gel-like, dries super-fast, is somewhat hardier than most ‘normal’ polishes (not UV gel hardy, but good) and cleans off easily with ordinary remover. More on that experience in another post…
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I bit the bullet and invested in the Seche Vite top-coat and that has some pretty good staying power.
You’re right about gels being a commitment though, it is a much bigger task to get them off than with regular polish.