Sometimes a salon will advertise Solar Nails, but not use the Solar Nail product. This is very unethical, but not uncommon.
In any case there is nothing different about Solar Nails other than the performance of the brand.

There are two different kinds of gel nails soak off and non-soak off. To make it even more confusing, several companies make gel nail products, but they call them something else like gel polish, polygel, acrogel or shellac.

The sad fact is that some nail techs are so confused; sometimes they have not had enough training on a particular product line. They might not even know how to remove it.
To make matters worse, there are some salons that will tell you they used gel, but they actually used a completely different product, perhaps with a gel top coat.

Not all salons do this. There are many, many quality salons out there. Try www.findanailtech.com to locate a salon in your area.

I find it best to stay away from “discount” salons. If their prices seem too good to believe, they probably are. They might be using cheap imported products and may cut corners on their sanitation practices.

The first step is to try to soak them off.

Take a small cotton ball and wet it with acetone. Place the cotton ball on your nail, and then wrap your finger with tinfoil to keep the cotton ball in place and prevent the acetone form evaporating.

Wait 10 minutes.

Remove the foil and cotton ball and try to scrape the gel off with an orangewood stick or a cuticle pusher. You should not need to scrape very hard at all and make sure you do not pierce your nail plate.
If it does not come off very easily, you do not have a soak off gel.

To remove a non-soak off gel you will need a nail file. Gently file the top of the gel to thin it out. It is best to leave a little bit of the product on the nail. Do not try to file it completely off or you could file down through your nail plate. It will take some time, but be very careful and gentle. Do not be in a hurry. Once you have it thinned out you can use a three step nail buffer to soothe it out and make it shiny.

To find a nail tech near you visit www.findanailtech.com

While the question is a valid one, the fact remains some of the answers are presented without much research into the facts.

Let’s get this out of the way right now.  Nearly everything can be linked to cancer in one way or another.

For example I could say with true authority that vegetables have been linked to cancer.  I can pull a poll of cancer victims and ask them if, in the 6 months before they were diagnosed with cancer, had they eaten any vegetables.  Nearly universally the answer would be yes.  Obviously that would be a coincidence.

Sometimes that is the way media works.  They will take some kind of obscure fact, manipulate the data and come up the conclusion they think will cause the most people to tune in.

Most of the questions about UV nail lamps and cancer were brought on by an observation printed by the American Medical Association stating that two people who had skin cancer had also been exposed to a UV nail lamp.  There were several inaccuracies in the article that any nail technician would have been able to clear up.  The media decided to run with the story without talking to industry experts.

Everyone knows that overexposure to the Sun’s UV rays has been linked to skin cancer.  I also believe that everyone knows that a UV lamp generates UV rays.  It’s naïve to think that there is no possibility of skin cancer from a UV lamp.

However let’s look at the realities of a UV lamp designed for nails.  The output of a UV nail lamp is so small it is nearly comparable to sunlight.

Assuming you are in the UV lamp for 10 minutes total, this is about the equivalent of driving in your car in the sun with your hands on the steering wheel for about 15 minutes.  Now let’s compare a UV nail lamp to a tanning bed.

The most common UV nail lamps have four 9 watt bulbs for a total energy usage of 36 watts.  A conservative commercial tanning bed can have 28 bulbs at 100 watts each or a total of 2800 watts.  A tanning bed is many times more intense then the sun, that is why you don’t need to sit in a tanning bed for an hour to get a tan.  I have never heard of anyone getting a tan or sunburn from normal UV nail lamp exposure.

So can a UV lamp designed for nails cause skin cancer?  Yes it probably can, if you sleep with it every night turned on strapped to your hand.  Or walk around all day with it turned on strapped your feet like shoes.  But if you did that people would think you were pretty weird.

But the more important question is will it cause skin cancer?  Probably not.  If you want to minimize your risk for skin cancer it would be much more important to wear a hat and sunscreen, do not sun bathe, and generally limit your exposure to the sun especially near water, snow or on cloudy days.  These tips are infinitely more important than skipping your 10 minutes of exposure in a nail UV lamp every two to four weeks.  If you are still concerned, the answer is simple.  Just apply a sunblock to your hands containing zinc oxide 1 hour before your nail appointment.