Care

When a pad stops sticking

Half the packs people give up on still have life in them, and half the ones they keep using are already done. Telling those apart takes a look and a fingertip.

Read the gel first

Hold the pad under a lamp and tilt it. Gel in good order looks wet and even across the whole face, and it takes a fingerprint that fades in a second or two. That pad is fine whatever it did last time.

Gel that has gone matte, or that shows dry patches with a different sheen from the rest, is at the end of its run. So is gel that stays dented where you pressed it. Neither of those comes back.

Edges lift long before the middle does

A pad usually fails from the rim inward. The corner curls, the curl catches on clothing, and the lifted part never lies down again. Caught early, the fix is one night pressed flat on the liner under something with a bit of weight.

What you cannot fix is a curl that has separated the gel from the cloth backing. Look at the very edge of a lifted corner: if you can see a pale line between the two layers, that pad is delaminating and the rest of it will follow.

It might be the wire, not the pad

Before deciding a pack is dead, swap the lead. A pin tail that has been pushed onto the same post two hundred times widens, and a widened socket makes contact only when the wire happens to sit at the right angle. A snap cup with a splayed rim does the same thing.

The tell is inconsistency. A worn pad fails the same way every time; a worn wire fails when you move and comes back when you sit still. If a fresh lead fixes it, the pads were never the problem.

Matte, patchy or dented gel: finished.
Curled corner, layers still joined: flatten it overnight.
Pale line between gel and cloth: delaminated, replace.
Comes and goes when you move: look at the lead wire.

Buying the replacement

Start from the connector rather than the old packet, since packaging changes and the connector does not. Pull the wire, check whether it ends in a post or a cup, and take that answer to the shelf.

If the old pads were the smallest squares, this is a reasonable moment to think about a bigger shape or a mixed pack, because a single order of two dozen small pads costs less per piece than replacing four at a time.