Gelaze "For Audrey"

Finally!  I lost my camera recently, so I had to take these photos with my camera phone on day 8 of my manicure--hence the little bit of regrowth at the cuticles that you see.  I did show you guys my nails a bit in my last post, where I also mentioned some dupes for this color, but this time I have a full review.

China Glaze's new gel polish line, called "Gelaze" (or to be more proper, "Geláze") is labeled as a gel color and base coat in one.  I'm a bit skeptical of this idea, as I've tried and disliked gel brands that sell "all-in-one" style polishes before. I've also tried Nailuv's dual base and top coat, which I realized after a while was really hurting my nails due to problem soak offs and lifting "all-in-one"! 

BUT! Despite all that, and despite the "shrinking" from the nail edges I've seen in many other reviewers' photos of Gelaze, I really wanted to try this gel as it says to--with no separate base coat.   

So let's go over the formula first for once: Gelaze "For Audrey" took four coats to cover up some of my nails' imperfections and not look streaky, but  I could probably get away with three coats if I had better nails!  Not to mention, since I skipped the base coat, that's about as many layers as I would use on a normal manicure anyway.   While the gel polish is a bit on the thinner side, miraculously I did not notice any "shrinking" from the edges with this color, nor did I notice any "stress cracking" when my nails happened to bend because of the thinness.  I did notice wrinkling on one nail, but only one nail--so just make sure you keep each coat thin to keep that from happening to you. The only other thing I noticed was that there was some chipping and lifting around day 7-8--only ever so slightly on the free edges of a few of my nails, but enough that I wanted to remove my manicure to avoid harboring bacteria. If you look really, really closely, you may see the "chipping" I'm talking  about in the macro photo I'll show of my accent color below.  I have a feeling I could easily improve upon this wear and tear by using my normal base coat.

As for the color, Gelaze "For Audrey" is a pastel robin's-egg-blue creme shade with just a little bit of a grey undertone.  While not a totally unique shade, as I found out after I bought it, I do like that it has the ability to look a little more pale or bold depending on the lighting and the colors you pair it with, just like a lot of pastels.

Now for the accent: I used Sally Hansen Salon Gel Polish in "Glisten Up!" dabbed onto the cuticle area with a "dotting tool" (aka an old broken pen) to create the classic "Ruffian" style manicure.  I used only one coat, which is why it may look a little patchy, but the abundance of glitter in this more than makes up for it!  The base is a dark, dark grey creme, but it is loaded with four sizes of glitter: a "teensy tiny" and slightly larger silver hex/round glitter, then a medium sized square silver glitter, and finally a large hexagonal silver glitter.  For added awesomeness, there are also sprinkles of pink, orange, gold, green and teal glitters in the large hexagonal size, too!  Now, I'll be honest--used as an accent, these sprinkles of color kind of became lost on the nail, with the overall effect of just being a dark grey gel with silver sparkles, but I'm sure as an all-over color this would stand out much more.