Top It Off

Seche Vite. Almost empty, I'm gonna have to get a new bottle soon :)

One thing that helped my nail art immensely was top coat. Sounds a bit silly, but when I first started I used either a very poor top coat or more usually, none at all. Right now my favorite is Seche Vite. You can find it at supermarkets and beauty supply stores both. I get mine at Wal-mart and Sally's Beauty Supply. There are many brands of top coat that is good for nail art, but as I have the most experience with this one I'll talk mostly of Seche Vite.

Pros and Cons after the jump...


This is a fast drying top coat. I had no idea such a thing existed when I first started. Slap this over your art and it dries to the touch in about a minute. No blowing endlessly on your fingers for half an hour only for the paint to still be tacky. Caution: This dries the surface to the touch. Depending on how thick your art is, it may still be dinged or dented. Think of a thin sheet of glass over jello, you might not get your fingers sticky but you can still squash the heck out of the jello. Now the downside to this fast drying topcoat? Well I've found that sometimes if you don't wait for your art to dry just a bit before adding the top coat it can "shrink" your paint. A fix to this is just let the polish dry a bit before adding the top coat. Kinda counters the whole "fast dry" aspect, but I believe over-all drying time is still faster than no top coat.

You can see the polish has pulled away from the tips of the nail.
China Glaze's "Cracked Medallion" over OPI's "Louve Me, Louve Me Not"

Now the next thing I love about Seche Vite is also something other people hate. It's thick. I like that because a lot of my free hand art or thick glitters need a thick topcoat to settle into the grooves and still give a glassy finish. Some people feel its too thick and feels weird to them. I prefer it. What I do find irritating about it being thick however, is that I tend to go through a bottle quickly. But on the other hand, I'm repainting my nails every couple of days. If you don't paint as often as I do, a bottle will last you longer than it does for me.

One final note: I am still relatively new to the nail art world so there are some things I don't understand yet. One of them is the ingredients in the polish. My personal thought so far (until I learn better) is that if its not safe they wouldn't sell it. But if you have certain health concerns then you need to watch some things that can be found in polishes. From what I understand, some of those chemicals are found in Seche Vite. Again, I don't rightly understand what is bad or why. Maybe one day when I do understand I'll write about it.