I was recently given the chance to try out Bio Seaweed Gel’s new Canadian themed Unity all in one collection, Uptown Lights. Each of the fifteen polishes are named after a Canadian city, so they teamed up with us Canadian Beauty Bloggers to share our thoughts on the collection.
It was hard to choose, do you choose by colours or by cities you love – or both? I went with two cities I have never visited, Halifax (Find this warm sandy nude at the harbors of Nova Scotia) and Whitehorse (Ride through the waves of the Yukon river with this turquoise green).
If you are not familiar with Bio Seaweed Gel polishes, they allow you to get a real soak off LED gel polish manicure without a LED light. Curing time is definitely longer without a light. The Solar Cure technology is amazing if you do not have access to a LED or UV curing light, but you need to sit in direct sunlight for 2 minutes for it to cure. If it is overcast, you may need a little longer. Full details on Solar Cure here.
Since I was doing a gradient nail and did not want the polish shifting over a longer cure time, I went with my trusty LED lamp. My lamp defaults to 40 seconds and that was plenty of time to leave the Bio Seaweed Gel Unity polish completely dry – even better, because they are designed to cure in sunlight, you don’t get that tacky stickyness after curing so you can gently touch your nails to make sure they are cured.
Bio Seaweed Gel is a fairly thick and pigmented formula. This is great for nail art like dots as you can get decent pigmentation in one coat but made a gradient more difficult. I ended up doing a base of Halifax to ensure full coverage and then the gradient as the second layer. Try to get the layers as thin as possible to reduce cracking/chipping
The Bio Seaweed Gel top coat took a little longer to cure, about a minute but took away the bumps from my dots and as you can see above, helped my manicure last a week before I removed it. As many of you will know, I rarely wear polish for more than a few days, even gels. The top coat is not needed, unlike many gel polishes, but will help extend your manicure.
My only complaint about this collection is that the images shown are not very accurate, so read the descriptions or check for swatches before choosing your colours. As you can see from the swatches above, Halifax is much more like how I imagined Winnipeg would look compared to the more pink/purple look shown, while Whitehorse is almost identical to the press image. There are lots of swatches available online including Bio Seaweed Gel’s Instagram for you to compare before buying.
About Bio Seaweed Gel
- Buy online here
- Most colours are $18 but they have weekly sales at $13
- Follow Bio Seaweed Gel on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Check out other Canadian Beauty Blogger reviews of the Bio Seaweed Gel Unity Uptown Lights collection here:
Very cool concept!