Nail professionals are forever looking for ways to save time and money. One thing we sometimes overlook is saving our bodies so that we can do this job until we drop dead, hopefully not at the nail table ;)
Thankfully every once in a while someone is looking out for us and comes up with a clever gadget designed to make our salon lives easier and save our bodies some wear and tear. Is it easy to shake a bottle of polish or gel polish? You bet. Does it start to take a toll on your hand, wrist, shoulder, etc day after day, bottle after bottle? Also a big affirmative. We turned to hobby paint shakers when CND Shellac made its debut and it became obvious the lighter solvents would evaporate upon opening the bottles if they hadn't been shaken, leading to thickening as the bottle got lower, eventually rendering them unusable if they were not shaken from the beginning. Other gel polishes also became noticeably separated from their pigments or mica and shaking caused bubbles that didn't like to quickly settle out of the gel.
The hobby paint shaker company realizing the market availability, reached out to see what improvements could be made to their model. The noise factor was pointed out, the instability of the machine bouncing all over the table, and the quick break down of the strap. Their solution was to put a "prettier" sticker on the machine, change the color of the plastic and charge more. Rather an insult to the industry, suggesting that we weren't intelligent enough to realize the difference.
Enter into the market the professional shakers designed for shaking polishes and gel polishes. They were not as obnoxiously loud as the hobby paint shakers, nor were they quiet. They did do some mixing, it was not quite as effective as the hobby paint shaker though unless you ran it for multiple cycles and put the polish right side up as well as upside down. The issue with running the polish upside down to shake, or even sideways as in the hobby shaker, is pooling in the cap which lead to polish in the threads and a mess in the cap.
Many reverted to hand shaking and sore palms. Some banged on the tables, some on thighs, others had clients shake their own.
Enter on March 1, the imix. This is the first gadget that is mixing instead of shaking, is quiet instead of loud, allows the polish to stand upright, and takes up a very small footprint on the nail table. For its debut the imix is exclusively available in the US, the UK, and Ireland. It will be globally available summer of 2021 which is only a few months from now.
Here is my video of unboxing it and first impressions:
The miXers for the imix are meant to stay in the polish or gel polish. You would ideally put them in your most commonly used colors. Mark the bottles so that you know which colors have the miXers in them. As a client selects the color, you or the client if it makes them happy, can set it on the imix to run through the mixing cycle on the Launch Pad. When a color becomes empty the miXers can be removed from the bottle with the miXtractor as shown in the video below and reused in another bottle.
To recap and summarize the imix:
is mixing instead of shaking
is quiet instead of loud
allows the polish to stand upright
takes up a very small footprint on the nail table
For more information on the imix visit https://imixyoupaint.com/
To purchase in the US https://famousnamesproducts.com/
To purchase in the UK and Ireland https://www.sweetsquared.com/
For those of you that already have your imix, I would love to hear what you think of it in the comments below, link to your videos even!