The Gel Couple from La Palm

La Palm Spa Products (the makers of Gel II) recently came out with a new product called The Gel Couple.  As seen above, the packages include a bottle of La Palm Gel Polish and a matching bottle of Airgel extended wear polish.  The gel polish requires a UV or LED lamp for curing, and the Airgel does not.  In addition to a few colors, I also received the base and top coats and some cuticle oil.

The La Palm website says that the gel polish will last up to 3 weeks, and Airgel will last up to 12 days.  I didn’t conduct a wear test on Airgel, but I did test out the gel polish to see how it compares with others.

Application

I decided to wear the color called Merlot, which is a dark wine purple.  I prepped my nails and made sure they were properly clean and free of oil and debris.  The polish was nice and thick and applied evenly with just two coats.  The brush is flat with a square end and was easy to use, though the square tip did make it a tad tricky to get into the curve on some of my smaller nails.  I thought the polish was staying in place without shrinking, but after curing two coats I realized that I did have a bit of shrinkage at the tips which is visible on the middle nail in the photo below.

The directions say to cure each coat for 30 seconds in a 36 watt LED lamp, so I used my Gelish 18G lamp.  I didn’t have any issues with curing until I got to the top coat.  After curing for 30 seconds and then cleansing, I noticed that many of my nails had a cloudy appearance.  In my experience, this usually means that the top coat isn’t fully cured.  After taking this picture I opted to apply a second layer of top coat to hide the cloudy look, and I cured this second coat for 60 seconds which did the trick.  After wiping the second time the top coat was clear and more shiny, though the top coat wasn’t as shiny as I would prefer.

Wear

I wore this color for two full weeks, which is a long time for me.  :)  I’m pretty rough on my nails now that I’m working in a salon and handling acetone all day, but I’m very pleased to say that the polish held up really well.  I didn’t have any issues with chipping or peeling until the very last day when I broke a nail.  The break happened when I was playing a game with my niece, and was totally my fault.  Up to that point the nail still looked perfect.

Removal

I used the traditional foil method to remove the gel polish.  It only took about 10 minutes of soaking in acetone for the polish to push off nicely.  I didn’t experience any issues or problems with removal.  My nails looked nice and healthy after the soak-off.  Yay!

Below are pictures of a couple other colors that I received.  Toasted Almond is a nice brown-toned neutral cream.

And Very Chromatic is a silvery shimmer polish.

Visit the La Palm website for more information about The Gel Couple.  There’s a link at the top where you can find a list of distributors, and the Gel Couple sets can also be purchased here.  The retail price for the colors is $12.99 per set, and the base & top coats are $15 per set.