I’ve seen Madam Glam polishes popping up on everyone’s account lately and they all look great, so when Andreea contacted me and asked if I would like a $15 store credit to try out one or more of their polishes, of course I said yes! Unfortunately, when it came to the checkout stage, I realised that their normal nail polish doesn’t ship outside of U.S. and Canada, but gel polish does. It seemed a bit weird to me but I was still eager to give them a go, so, I decided to get one gel from their range and it could be my first foray into the gel polish world.
What I didn’t realise was how much was needed to do gels, so while this arrived a little while ago, I then had to purchase (and wait for) gel basecoat, gel topcoat and rubbing alcohol (all purchased elsewhere with my own pennies)! I know you also need a UV light but being that I wasn’t sure about how this was going to go, I opted out of buying one and opted in to using my UV torch, no matter how tedious, so that I wasn’t wasting too much money.
Disco Night is a dusty pink glow in the dark. When I tried 2 coats on a swatch stick it was opaque and so that, mixed with the fact that I wasn’t really keen on soaking it off led me to use a peel off base coat which has glitter in it. As you can tell, 2 coats later and the sparkle still showed through. It applied as a very delicate colour which would have looked great over white or silver.
I honestly think I was applying it wrong because, if you look at my thumb, I had applied 3 coats and the bottom 3 quarters of the nail has a bolder colour, whereas the top quarter does not. I ‘cured’ each coat for 2 mins, because I read somewhere online that that was the right amount of time and the polish seemed hard afterwards so I just assumed it was right.
In the dark, the polish was absolutely phenomenal, with a beautiful and strong, bright green.
So what I have gleamed from this experience is that Madam Glam have indeed got some gorgeous, fantastic quality gel polishes but also that gel is definitely not the thing for me, it takes too long, there are too many stages and too many things that can and, in my case, do go wrong. I also experienced a bit of pain under my nails whilst curing and I never found out why it was doing it.
I might try it again some time and now that I have the topcoat I am tempted to try the chrome powder, because it looks awesome.
I hope they open up shipping to the UK for their standard polishes in the future, I’d love to give some of them a go.
:)x
