Artificial muscles, or soft actuators, that could exhibit contractile stroke and operate in open-air, would be crucialfor many applications, such as robotics, prosthetics, or powered exoskeletons. Amongst the different artificialmuscle technologies, electrochemical carbon nanotube (CNT) yarn muscles, transducing capacitively ionicaccumulation at the electrochemical double layer into linear contraction, are amongst the most promisingcandidates. However, their performances are either limited by an undesired bipolar behaviour or short lifetimedue to the inevitable drying of water-based electrolytes. In this paper, we present here the fabrication of airoperatingcontractile linear artificial muscles from commercially available CNT yarns exhibiting outstandingperformance. The synthesis and the junction of two ionogels based on cationic and anionic polyelectrolyte havebeen designed for the coating process on CNT yarns, and for selectively orienting the ionic flow allowing optimalelectromechanical energy conversion. The dual-electrode CNT yarn actuators showed air-stable unipolar contractilestroke, reaching 9.7% without loss of performances after 2000 cycles.