I love doing my nails, and after trying out a lot of different top coats and bases, here are the best ones I’ve found to this day.

Best base coat : OPI Nail Envy

Base coats are important to protect your natural nails. They also to prevent any staining especially when using a darker nail polish color.

I believe in efficiency so if a product can do more than one thing at a time then it hits my radar, and if it actually works : I’m sold! So this base coat does indeed keep your nails from becoming too yellow and has the added bonus of actually making your nails stronger and less brittle. Yes your nails will actually experience less peeling when using this. At least mine do. It’s  a two in one product.

If your nails are in very bad shape, you actually need to use this base coat daily to see good results. So using it as a base coat isn’t entirely compatible with using it as a strengthener only. Mine are pretty naturally strong and grow fast even if I happen to break a nail. So using this once a week as a base coat, is the perfect maintenance trick I need.

The only con I can think of is the price, OPI products tend to be on the more expensive side around 11 or 12$ and 14€.

Best Top Coat : Seche Vite

This should come as no surprise, it’s a very popular top coat for a reason. It creates a beautiful layer of gorgeous protection on any mani you are sporting. It has a thicker consistency than most top coats, and it might turn some people off. This doesn’t bother me in the slightest and I actually think it’s one of the reasons it works so well.

It prolongs the life of any polish I’m wearing what ever the brand may be. Granted if the nail polish is crapy it won’t transform it into somehting awesome, but it keeps most polishes from chipping a lot longer than if you were wearing them alone or with another top coat.

It adds a beautiful shine and keeps your polish from fading over time and losing its initial luster as most manis do after three days. This keeps the mirror effect for the full seven days of wear, which is how long most my manis last thanks to this top coat. I change my mani every Sunday for the new week.

It is a safe-proof top coat if you are into nail art and don’t want to wait for your layers to dry. I’m impatient in general and waiting for polish to dry is the unfun part of doing my nails. Thanks to Sèche Vite I can immediately apply it over my design without fear of smudging. (By this I mean that by the time I’ve done my nail art on all my fingers, I can go ahead and apply the top coat to the first finger on the hand I started out with). It even works as well over any stamping you might be doing, such as the Konad stamping system. [BTW I’ll be doing a review on it shortly]. The Konad has its own top coat that is also slightly thicker than usual, but you don’t need to use it and can easily substitute Sèche Vite!

Last and most loved feature of this amazing top coat is the fast drying ! It’s in the name after all : it’s French for ‘dries quickly’. And I can say it’s a claim that is backed up. I use it to dry all the previous layers of polish. I love it because it cuts down the drying time to almost nothing and I can go back to what ever I’m doing without being stuck after doing my nails.

There is one con to this wonderful top coat. It does tend to turn goopy and dry faster than other top coats on the market. The Company knows this and actually has a fix for it : the Sèche Restore fluid. However keep that in mind if buying another product is a hassle.

Personally I think this con doesn’t take away from the amazing performance of the product. I definitely recommend you check it out if you haven’t yet.

You can see it in action in my previous post on My new favorite nail combo as well as in the picture bellow where I’m using both the Nail Envy base coat and the Sèche Vite top coat.

What are your favorite top coats and base coats?

Shop my post :

• Opi Nail Envy  : USA (here) & France (here) (*)
• Sèche Vite dry fast top coat : USA (here) & France (here)(*)
• Sèche Restore : USA (here) & France (here)(*)

(*) affiliate links