Sooo, final part of my manicure products. Now we're leaving the realm of treatments to deal with products that are specific to manicures and have to be used when you want to polish your nails.
First thing is pushing back cuticles. Cuticles are a barrier between the outside and your nail matrix so they are necessary to avoid infections, but they are not very aesthetic and pushing them back will make polish application and clean-up easier. But this operation requires a lot of delicacy and good products.
First is Blue Cross Cuticle Remover, which I have in a big bottle and use in this smaller one. It's quite potent and while I've read that some people were using it with the scrapping end of a metallic cuticle pusher, my nails are too fragile and I just use a plastic one. This stuff literally melts the dead skin of your cuticles but as I'll tell you later, it might need to be used in combination with another product. Moreover, it's ridiculously cheap, less than 5$ for 32oz.
I also had the occasion to test LM Cosmetic cuticle remover and oddly enough, I would say that this and Blue Cross are complementary: LM is really good for pushing back cuticles, which will then be scrapped easily with Blue Cross. With Blue Cross alone, if your cuticles are a bit grown on the nail, you might hurt yourself when scrapping, while if you push them back first, the result will be clean and perfect.
Once your cuticles are pushed back, it's time for the basecoat. While my nails were still fragile, I tried to reduce buffing them to a minimum, and my ridges were quite visible, so I took to using a ridge-filler basecoat. I tried Zoya's and OPI's but was disappointed, while China Glaze's is perfect. It dries to a smooth satin finish and since it's slightly coloured, it's perfect for French manicure or to wear bare, it makes your nails natural but better! However, I found out after some months of use that it didn't protect the nail against stains and my nails had gotten yellow. So now I keep it only when I do a French manicure.
On a daily basis, I now use Orly Bonder, a rubberized top-coat that improve the adherence of polish and is known to prevent staining. I have indeed noticed quite a difference and whenever I decided to keep a manucure for some days (which, I admit, doesn't happen often), I saw an improvement too, my polish didn't chip.
Once base and polish are applied, a manucure is finished with a top-coat. It can serve several purposes, but the main one is a glossy finish and helping your manicure last longer.
Seche Vite is one of the most popular top-coats out there. Highly glossy, fast-drying, you can finish up a manicure and walk away five minutes later without any fear of smudges. However it has a couple of drawbacks: if there's a difference of consistency between the top-coat and the polish (one of the two being significantly thicker or thinner than the other), it'll make your polish shrink. It also has a tendency to thicken quite quickly too, you need to invest in a bottle of Seche Restore to keep it manageable. Finally, it's not known to help your manicure last longer.
If you want to have a long-lasting manicure, LM Cosmetic top-coat is one of the solutions, but since nothing can be perfect, it's not fast drying!!
So while I'm aware of its flaws, Seche Vite remains my favourite top-coat. It's quite hard to test quick drying top-coats in France since almost everything has to be ordered online, and while I've read some good reviews of Nubar Diamont for example, I'm not ready to fork that price. I use a lot of top-coat, so the big refill bottle of Seche Vite is comes quite cheap and is a very good compromise for its shrinkage and thickness!!
