This manicure is a polish to gel one, created with the GelTouch Mini Starter Kit.

This great little kit from United Beauty contains a mini LED lamp and a gel top coat. The GelTouch top coat is an LED-cured top coat that transforms any nail polish into a gel manicure. Typically gel manicures last two weeks and usually only need redoing then because of nail growth.

The mini lamp good enough for one finger at a time and plugs into your PC or Mac with a USB cable.

It is a 60-second cure and has an automatic cut out after the minute is up – or you can switch it on and off if you’re flash curing something. Of course you can use your own lamp if you want to do all your nails at once, but as with any gel system, it is always best to use the lamp that comes with the system and which is therefore calibrated to properly cure the gel in question.

The GelTouch Mini Starter Kit includes:

• GelTouch Clear Top Coat
• Mini LED lamp with USB cable
• Gel Cleansing Wipes

I tried it with Orly Miss Conduct. The instructions say to wait until your regular polish is completely dry and suggest this is 20-30 minutes. I left mine for at least an hour, just in case. I didn’t use a quick dry (nail polish) top coat as I thought this would make me think the polish was dry – because the top coat probably would have been before the polish underneath was – and I thought it might affect the results.  But I’m sure you could use a quick dry top coat – as long as you left it long enough. Perhaps, for example, if it was the day before’s manicure or something.

Then I added the gel polish. Now personally, I’m gel polish qualified, but as long as you follow a few simple rules, I don’t think there’s a problem with people doing their own gel manicures at home.

The things to remember are: shake the polish well (this is hard for us polish lovers to accept, but needs to be done); apply thin coats; do not let the gel polish touch your skin – if it does, remove it immediately; cap the free edges with each coat; cleanse the sticky layer at the end using the provided wipes (or rubbing alcohol). You should also only use the lamp that is recommended for the gel polish you are using.

I did two coats for best longevity. It had a really great shine.

I love the tiny lamp. I’m a self-employed marketing consultant and I mainly work from home. So my work desk is also my nails desk, which makes it very easy to plug in this little lamp into my PC and cure away. It’s really dinky, only about the size of a box of matches, and has two folding legs that raise it up enough to put your finger under.

When it comes to removal, you can just gently peel it off in one go (see the video below). I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that, as I thought there was a chance of damaging the nail. But it really does just peel off easily, taking the regular nail polish with it. I found it easiest to file the ends of my nails, to release one of the anchor points of the gel. In a couple of cases, that filing lifted up the now free edge of the polish/gel and allowed me to get under it with my nail and then ease it off. But if you’re unsure, you can simply soak them off as you would with other gel polish. I tried it that way too, and after about five minutes of soaking, the top layer of gel lifts up and can then be swiped off, along with the polish underneath, with a pad soaked in acetone.

You can buy the Gel Touch Mini Starter kit for £24.99. You can also buy it on Amazon.

I love this little kit and can really recommend it if you fancy extending the wear of a manicure every now and then. If you’re a regular gel polish user, then a kit with a larger lamp that can fit four fingers in might be more appropriate, but for occasional use, or as an introduction to gel polish, this is fantastic.