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UNO by Gelish MINI is a new time-saving way to get a gel nail polish treatment at home in under 5 minutes (I’m not kidding)!
gelish curing light
The one-step polish soak-off gel nail polish is exciting and new. You simply paint one or two coats of this gel polish on your nails and cure it under a LED light (I used a Gelish Min Pro Curing Light approx $60) . UNO by Gelish Mini is a base coat, color and top coat all in one. Believe it!
check out the 20 colors of UNO by Gelish Mini!
There are 20 colors to choose from with brights to lights. The suggested retail price is $11.00 a bottle (at SallyBeauty.com) although I saw the prices fluctuate a bit from place to place.
The hardest part of applying UNO by Gelish Mini is selecting your favorite color! They are all so pretty and trendy!
The Hardest Part Is Selecting A Color!
This all sounds great, but gels can be hard to manage. These were super easy to handle. The hardest part was selecting a color!
I picked a neutral (“Magic Mauve”) for my first test. It is actually a bit deeper than it looks in the photo below. These polishes are slightly thicker than normal polish but they still applied very smoothly and seemed to flow onto my nails effortlessly.
Nail Prep:
I really didn’t do any nail prep other than pushing back my cuticles, but I should have lightly buffed my nail beds as well. When I applied the polish it flowed onto my nails almost effortlessly, but one of my nails was rough underneath and the polish once cured, looked rough and a bit uneven.
These polishes are slightly thicker than normal polish. If you need several coats that’s fine, but while I didn’t need more than two, you might depending upon the color you choose. Keep them thin or they may not cure well or you may get bubbles.
LED Light
Once the first coat was on my first set of five nails, I cured them with the LED light before starting the other hand. The polish wasn’t as shiny as I had hoped, and one of my nails was a bit bumpy. This is probably due to the fact that my nails are not in good shape to begin with. You really should smooth out any bumps before you begin.
The second set of five nails looked a lot better/
Although the first coat covered well, I figured two coats would be better, so I repeated the process on both hands.
When you’re trying something new, it’s not always a slam-dunk right away. My first test wasn’t as great as one done by a professional nail tech, but it wasn’t bad. It would have been nice if my nails were smoother and shinier, but this might have also been due to the polish I chose. To make the polish look better, I added a high shine top coat.
In all fairness, I didn’t prep my nails first. I didn’t smooth out the ridges prior to trying the polish. And I think I might have gone a bit heavy on the coats of polish as they felt a bit sticky, Just to be sure I wouldn’t ruin the polish, I cured a few more seconds to make sure they were completely dry.
The entire process still only took about 5-6 minutes.
Anyone’s nails will look great after they’ve just been polished, so I’m showing you mine after an entire WEEK with UNO by Gelish Mini
Seeing is Believing!
Gelish touts the UNO by Gelish Mini as lasting 7-10 days. I am very hard on my nails and most polish lasts a day or two at the most. I bash my nails against the computer keyboard hours a day. This weekend I picked blueberries and did other “manual labor.” My UNO by Gelish nail polish is wearing but not too bad considering.
A Soak-off Solution:
The UNO by Gelish Mini nail gels require you to soak them off with acetone, which means that you’ll still go through that tedious process of removing the remaining polish as with longer lasting nail gel treatments.
Ironically, that takes longer that it does to put the gel polish on your nails by a big margin!
The Bottom Line:
UNO by Gelish MINI is ideal for a busy woman who wants her polish to last a few days longer. It’s a good idea if you need your nails to look nice a few days longer and you don’t want to deal with touch-ups. It’s great for those who love gel manicures but don’t want to go to a salon or deal with the process and the cost of the traditional gel methods, .
But the process while quick to apply, isn’t quick to remove, so I can’t give it five stars just yet. I have always dreaded soaking gel off my nails. It not only takes a lot of time, but the acetone soak weakens your nails if you do it often enough.
So while I love the idea of quick and easy gel nail treatments that last longer and traditional nail polish, I’d say that UNO by Gelish Mini is great for occasional use. It’s a mixed bag of blessings. If you want longer wear near polish this gel works well, but you have to spend the time to get it off your nails. So if you really want a gel treatment that lasts, you might still opt for the really longer wear traditional gel method and invest the time up front. Then enjoy really long wear polish. You’ll be dealing with the removal process anyway when the gel starts to wear at the edges or your nails start to grow out.
You can get these in a number of places including Sally Beauty but for more information I suggest you first visit the UNO by Gelish Mini Page on the Gelish Web Site
