The thing about dip
Traditional dip means dipping ten fingers into a communal jar of powder. Whatever is on the nail (skin cells, bacteria, the resin from the previous person) goes into the jar and comes back out on the next client. Studios that do it well pour the powder over the nail into a discard tray instead, and never return the excess.
Ask which. It is a fair question with a short answer, and it is the single most useful thing to know about a studio offering dip. We do not offer it at all, which is a decision about jars rather than about chemistry.
The other honest problem with dip is repair. A cracked acrylic or gel nail can be filed back and rebuilt in ten minutes. Dip generally cannot: the layers are thin and bonded to each other rather than sculpted, so the fix is a removal and a rebuild.
Weight, which is what actually matters
Every one of these is heavier than your nail. The question is how much and where. Weight concentrated past the fingertip acts on a lever: at a centimetre of extension the force at the stress point is roughly double what it is at half.
This is why the material argument is usually the wrong argument. A short acrylic set is gentler than a long gel one, every time, regardless of which product is nominally “better for your nails”.
What to actually choose on
How often you want to come in. Gel and Gel-X at three to four weeks, acrylic at three to four with a rebalance. No real difference.
How you want it to come off. This is the biggest practical difference and nobody leads with it. Gel-X: fifteen minutes. Hard gel: fifteen. Acrylic: thirty. Dip: twenty to thirty and more scraping.
What you do with your hands. Which returns to the same answer as everything else on this site.