Paitence is golden.
The best way to get the most perfect, long lasting set of nails is to grow your own. Start with your natural nails, which ever length they are now. Do a structured gel overlay today. Rinse and reapeat.
Grow your nails with a gel structured manicure
What is a structured gel manicure on natural nails?
The idea is to add a layer of strenghthening product to protect your nails from breaking, allowing them to grow out to their maximum potential.
If your nails are not prepped yet - start with nail preparation.
If they're prepped and ready to go - choose a builder gel product and get to work.
Long strong nails don't have to be fake. If you want to avoid having to extend your nails in any one of the methods that add artificial length, you can grow your own nails to their maximum length.
How to grow natural nails at home, the easy way - Strcutured Gel Manicure.
Simply start covering your natural nails in builder gel, even when they are short.
Natural nails grow super fast with a structured gel manicure overlay, keeping the nails from chipping or breaking. Strcutured Gel Manicure on natural nails will allow you to grow them quickly over time with very low maintenace of once every few weeks to a month, depending on your natural nails' growth rate.
Maintaining the structured gel manicure simply requires doing a fill whenever the nail grows and the strcture grows away from the cuticle skin.
If you just took a break from gel manicures and are starting from short natural nails, or you're fed up with using extension methods that are hard to do on yourself, try this method of getting long nails with natural time, by covering your natural nails with a structured gel.
Structured Gel Manicure
What is a Strctured Gel Manicure?
The idea behind the structured gel manicure, sometimes called Anatomically Structured Gel Manicure, is to emulate and enhance the natural healthy structure of the nail by adding hard gel as a durable, protective overlay product.
The Apex
The Apex of the nail is the highest and thickest part of the structure that is applied to the nail when doing a structured gel overlay. The Apex is the most important part of your manicure and it will dictate how strong and lasting the gel manicure will be, especially when the nails start getting longer.
This is the central point of the nail plate - the nail plate is the part of the nail from the cuticle to the start of the free edge - the part of your nail that is not in touch with your actual finger.
This point is the bridge between the growth points of the nail - the central cuticle and the nail sides.
Keeping the Apex of the nail well structured, will improve the durability of the gel manicure due to the support of the nail sides which are most delicate, thus helping gel manicures last for 4-8 weeks without breaking or chipping.
The Free Edge
The free edge of the nail is the part of the nail that starts at tip of the nail and ends where the nail meets the the finger and the skin. The free edge is kept as the thinnest point of the nail structure, it is usually filed to one of the most popular shapes: square, almond, stilleto, coffin and oval.
Usually, when wearing such a hard overlay, we only need to fill out the growth of the nail near the cuticle and leave the free edge with the lighetest addition. As the nails grow, the anatomic structure of the nails changes, with the previous apex structure moving higher onto the nail, while the actual apex of the nail is kept without support.
When doing a structured gel manicure fill, we make sure to adjust the Apex to its new position after the nails grew, thus supporting the longer free edge that is farther from the cuticle then it was before.
Easy Maintenace - Quick Results
When we maintain the strutctured gel manicure, by applying the hard gel overlay fill, we use the product from the cuticle, downward, creating the apex again in the new position, and thus we don't have to remove the whole product when the nails grow, we should only file off around the growth and file off any lifting or separation of the gel product from the natural nail.
This makes filling very quick, as the whole structure doesn't have to be removed, only the outer frame and any part that no longer sticks well to the nail (lifting).
The great thing about the structured gel manicure, is that it is a low maintenace treatment, needed just every 4-8 weeks depending on your nails growth rate, and within 4 months you will find your nails are longer than they've ever been naturally. This is the best way to achieve long strong nails without doing any extension, and without acrylics.
The structured gel manicure overlay can be done simply and at home with a basic set of tools, equipment and products.