Recently I received a “Fuse Gelnamel” kit from their PR department. It was a bit of bad timing considering only a few months before hand I had been desperately trying to find a gel system that I could buy from the beauty stores here with no luck. I ended up getting a full set for Christmas and discovered a brand of polishes that I really liked so I wasn’t really in the market for anything anymore… but I do like trying new things so yay!
|
The Fuse system markets itself as an all in one solution and you can get a starter kit with everything you need for a set of nails. Everything I received in the package is below.
 This is what the starter kit contains.
 I’ve seen the starter kit in stores for $49ish. I really liked the marketing, it’s quite funny!
 At $49ish it’s the cheapest set I’ve seen in shops here that includes a lamp. That said, if you order supplies online you can get bigger lamps for less with polishes included as well.
I was a bit confused about the lamp. I’ve seen these in a lot of shops lately but mine came with a European (I think?) power plug which is useless in Australia. I assume that the ones being sold in Aus shops have the correct power plug but if you are considering buying one I would check first just in case. It also came with a USB power cable so I just used that instead.
 So let’s get started with it! I followed the instructions in the box to apply a coat of the light pink glitter polish. Basically that involves buffing and cleaning the nail with the solution provided (similar to rubbing alcohol), painting on a coat of polish and then holding your finger in the lamp for 30 seconds. The packaging says you only need one coat but I think that is referring to not needing a base/top coat because I found the polish to needed 2 coats to come close to being opaque.
 This is my end result…
 The system had some good parts but also some negatives as well. I loved the tiny lamp. It’s adorable and perfect for traveling. Doing one finger at a time wasn’t the quickest way ever but I could see how it’s still probably quicker than regular polish if you’re base/top coating and waiting a while for everything to dry. The top of the lamp comes off and flips around so you can do your toes too. Genius. I really did love the lamp but I had quite a few problems with the polishes.
 The pink that I tried was streaky and had a gloopy consistency. I’ve used a lot of gel polishes and this didn’t seem normal to me, it made it hard to work with and I had to put a lot of effort in to get a decent finish.
 The brush in the pink polish was half size as well for some reason. I’m not sure if I got a dud or if this was supposed to be a feature but the other two polishes I had were normal sized brushes. If it was a random dud that might explain the texture as well.
Weird tiny pink brush:
 Normal brush in the red:
 I did a set of the red nails as well and while the formula was better than the pink it still wasn’t anything to write home about. That was a bit disappointing because I loved the lamp so much. I gave the lamp a try with my other gel polishes and it didn’t cure them correctly so I can only assume that it’s a lower power than my other UV lamps and perhaps the consistency of the Fuse polishes is more on the nail polish side than the gel side.
 I love gel polishes and I wanted to like this set a lot but between the wrong power plug and the weird brush I’m thinking I got a bad batch. Seeing as I have the lamp now anyway, I might have a look at some of the other Fuse gels which are available in store and see how they stack up against the ones I was sent, possibly the formula changed when it became commercially available? No idea but I’m definitely open to giving it another go!
Have any of you guys tried these out? What did you think? Do you have any other brands I should try?
|
