How to use gel polish and nail polish together – gelly sandwich!

I’ve thought for a while about combining my normal polish with a gel topcoat and base coat but I’ve never actually got round to testing it as I feel like it’s a lot of time and effort for something that might not work out – and at the minute spare time isn’t something I’ve got a lot of!

I wear gel polish 99% of the time these days as I find it means I’m not doing my nails every couple of days and it definitely stops my nails from snapping.

Anyway, my lovely mother gave me this fab OPI polish (Make Light of the Situation) that I really wanted to try so I decided that this was the time to try out layering polish and gels. With hindsight I probably could have just layered it over the top of my gel polish like a topcoat but I wanted to try it out properly so I went for it.

I did my gel polish as normal (using NYK1 Secrets in Nude – full kit review here), using the base coat and colour coat. I then added a layer of the OPI normal polish, stuck my hands under the UV lamp just to speed up drying time, then added the top coat and cured as normal. When I wiped off the sticky top layer, everything stayed in place.

Some of the tutorials I read in the run up were about using normal polish only and just the gel top and base coat, apparently you have to wait as long as possible for every individual layer of normal polish to try before you add top coat and cure otherwise when you wipe the sticky layer off the top coat the wet polish underneath just comes away.

I’m really pleased with the end result, I think the glitter works really well with the nude gel and makes a nice, subtle nude mani with a nice sparkly twist. It’s lasted way better than normal polish usually does too so I’ll definitely be trying this again! I’ve got a lot of fab nail polish colours that I’m just not using at the minute because gel has taken over my life.

Saying all this I still want to get some more gel colours from NYK1 Secrets – a white, a light grey and a black with glitter I think, but maybe I’ll just keep experimenting with my polish colours for the time being. I'm still trying to be a bit better at using things up before buying new things so...

This is probably going to be my last post before Christmas so hope you have an amazing one!

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