If you’ve every held a silicone breast implant in your hand (pre-implantation), you know how soft and squishy they are, or can be. Squeeze your cheeks (gently) or feel your (or someone’s) love handles. . . that’s the consistency and softness a gel-filled appliance (GFA) should have. The best GFAs are made with a gel that has a much firmer consistency than you’d find in a silicone breast implant or breast enhancement product.
GFAs are arguably the single most difficult type of prosthetic appliance to make by reason of the steps involved in merely casting the appliance into the mold. The silicone gel must fill something; it is a gel-filled appliance. The gel is one component. The other, a silicone envelope or capsule, must be created for the gel to fill. How is that accomplished? By using an encapsulator, which can (should) be silicone or a liquid-like vinyl cap material that will cure to a solid, flexible skin. Using an encapsulator other than silicone could cause the gel and the encapsulating envelope not to bond well and to separate (since nothing sticks to silicone except other silicone), causing unwanted and largely unfixable problems with the appliance. As long as you don’t try to add a platinum gel to a tin encapsulator, the silicones should cure and bond permanently to each other without a problem.
