To be disappointed with this gel manicure?

The shaping looks a bit uneven. I have ultra short nails (they break easily so I like to keep the little buggers as short as possible) and they don’t look like with a rounded shape.

I want to know where you get a £25 gel polish though. It’s £35 round ma bit.

Length doesnt help and it's a poor colour choice for that length but
also poorly applied (too thick) and the manicure to cuticles etc looks crap.

Buy an LED lamp and do it yourself at home its about £50 and honesty won't be any worse

YANBU- that looks gloopy and wrong.
also if they were actually too short to do they could have advised you that and said don’t waste your money.

so they can’t have it both ways. Get a refund and go elsewhere.

I would assume OP works in health care- infection control is v strict on short nails.

Different nail shapes and lengths can look better with certain colours and I think this colour wasn't the right choice for yours OP (or for any length/shape, it is a bit tipp-ex), but they've done a sloppy job. You can still have nicely shaped and painted nails but they've not done this. Was it a paint only manicure?

I could have done better myself and I'm no nail technician.

They are very short though - not sure if that makes it harder to do them.

They're a mess, but such short bitten nails were never going to look great. It's difficult to work with such small surface area.

As pretty much everyone said they’re tricky nails to work with, too short to be able to shape properly and evenly.
Saw that you’ve taken them off now. Lesson learnt I suppose, £25 is incredibly cheap so I also wonder if it’s a matter of getting what you pay for (i used to get mine done 15 years ago and paid £30 then for shellac, prices must have gone up considerably since then?). Now I only go for an occasional pedicure and pay around £60 for a ‘deluxe’ pedi, not sure what makes it deluxe but they do a great job.

They don't look good but this is probably down to your nails being in a bad way rather than them doing a bad job. I wouldn't have bothered getting them done professionally while they were like that. I'd grow them a bit so they're not digging into the skin and then go.

They don’t look great but those look bitten to the quick which doesn’t help. You can have short nails but to the nail edge and shaped would look a lot nicer.

Mine look better then that and I do them myself with Holy Gels!

As others have said probably too short to look amazing, but these are pretty horrific. They’re really messy, they don’t seem to have cleamed up the sides or anything. I feel like they could have at least tidied them up a bit

Good point. At £25 it does suggest one of the dodgy walk in nail bars that often have "questionable" employment processes.

This. And the colour is dreadful on those nails.

They do look awful. Also I'm not sure how they are that short if you say you aren't biting them. Surely you aren't cutting them that low?

Not good.

The shape is awful and different on each nail (although I appreciate you might have gone to her with that shape in which case there wasn't anything she could do). If not, you can still shape very short nails nicely.

The cuticles are a mess. Apart from her not tidying them up, the colour is also applied badly around them.

If looks like she got colour on your skin too?

White is very difficult to wear on nails. It has to be absolutely perfect to look good. If you had a different colour, it may have been more forgiving?

Whilst you will not be going again, my first thought upon seeing the photos was whether or not this was one of the nail places which have been thought to employ migrants with no right to work here, or modern slavery. I hope that is not the case.

It doesn’t look as if they have tidied the shape of the nails, neatened the cuticles or applied the gel carefully. Not good!!

Dear me, what a mess. Your nails are very short, were they already like that? But the gels have been messily applied regardless. Terrible colour too, did you choose it?

Did you remove the gel properly? It can be really damaging to the nails if you peel off or anything like that.

I suspect you work in a similar industry to me and nail length should be 3mm or less. A good manicurist can shape the nails, but it is tricky. I always go for neutrals and often the translucent neutrals. So I have short neat, professional looking nails.

Colours with a white base are always thick and gloopy looking.
They shouldn't blame it on your nail length because it's irrelevant to the job they've done.

The colour and the length doesn’t help. I also think, for £25, they’re unlikely to be doing cuticle work etc. I’d let them grow while this colour is on, and go to somewhere better for your next one.

They look a mess TBH.

If they haven't been bitten why/how are you managing to cut them to below the level of the tip of the finger? There's no need for that, even in jobs where short nails are required you don't have to literally cut every last bit of white off? Definitely need to let them grow even a week or two will make a difference. The issue is being able to see the tip of the finger beyond the end

Do you want them to be any longer or do you keep them that length purposely? If you want them to be longer, even just slightly, so that gels look better (especially with bold colours like white), get some BIAB (I recommend Mylee) in a clear colour and a cheap lamp and grow them out yourself at home, filing the sides regularly.

£25 is half what I’d expect to pay for a decent gel manicure- was this some sort of groupon deal or something? Presumably you chose the colour? I don’t think it’s a bad job given the what they were working with