Hand & Nail Care
Buy and sell hand and nail care in Costa Rica.
In Costa Rican salons almost every manicure now ends in semipermanente, the gel polish that sets under a lamp and holds for weeks, and plenty of people have bought the bottles to do it at home. Next to those colours come the kits people pick up after a nail course, acrylic powder with its liquid or tubes of polygel, and the quieter side of the shelf: hand cream and cuticle oil. New and used both turn up. With anything that touches skin and nails, used should mean sealed, or a bottle whose colour and fill level the seller can actually show.
Nail polish, semipermanente and the systems that add length:
ordinary polish dries in the air and comes off with remover, so it suits anyone without a lamp. Semipermanente looks the same in the bottle but only sets under a UV or LED lamp; left to air-dry it never hardens. It wants its own base and top coat, and comes off by soaking or filing, not with a cotton pad. Lamps and nail drills are under beauty tools and accessories. Length is a separate job. Acrylic is a powder worked with a liquid monomer and a brush: it sets fast and ends up hard, with a strong smell. Polygel, also sold here as acrylgel, comes in a tube, is shaped with a slip solution and cures under the lamp, which is why people learning at home lean towards it. Soft gel tips are full-cover tips fixed down with gel, the nearest thing to a salon set without any sculpting. Ask which system a kit is for first: acrylic liquid is no use with polygel, and one line’s powder with another’s liquid is a gamble.
Press-on sets and the steel tools that outlast them:
press-ons come boxed with tips in a run of sizes for every finger, fixed with glue or adhesive tabs, and a set with sizes missing rarely fits a new pair of hands. Steel cuticle nippers, pushers and clippers last for years and can be cleaned properly, so a used set is fair game. Emery boards, buffers and sponge files cannot be disinfected and are bought new. Hand cream and cuticle oil sit here; body lotion is under skin care.
A gel colour priced against a salon semipermanente:
a single bottle of gel polish costs around ₡4,000 to ₡7,000 new, less than one semipermanente manicure at a salon, which is why so many people start with a few colours and a lamp. A home polygel or acrylic starter kit runs from about ₡12,000 to ₡35,000. Once opened, a gel bottle loses most of its value, because nobody can see how much is left or whether it has begun to thicken. A kit holds more of its price when the powders and gels are still sealed and only the brushes and forms have been used.
Reading a dark gel bottle you cannot see into:
gel polish comes in opaque bottles because light starts the cure, so one kept on a sunny windowsill or beside the lamp can thicken from the neck down. Unscrew it and lift the brush: the colour should run off smoothly, and strings, lumps or a crust round the rim mean it is going. Ordinary polish that has turned gloopy can be rescued with polish thinner, never with remover, but one that has split into a clear layer and will not mix back after rolling is finished. Acrylic liquid should be clear, in a bottle capped tight, and a polygel tube should still squeeze soft. A metal nipper should close with its edges meeting along the whole jaw, with no gap and no nick.
Swatch tips for every colour in the box:
a dark bottle tells a buyer nothing about its shade, so paint each colour onto a plastic tip or a swatch stick, cure it, and photograph the row in daylight with each bottle’s number beside it. Say which are unopened, roughly how many manicures each opened one has done and where they were stored. Much of what turns up comes from a manicurista who moved from acrylic to polygel and kept the powders, or from a colour collection somebody stopped using. A manicurista coming in from Nicoya for a box of colours will want to see one brushed onto a tip, still wet, before paying, so keep a few blank tips to hand.