Essie Here To Stay Base Coat Long Lasting Nail Polish

Most Helpful Positive Review

Fast and Smooth

Using a fast drying top coat is the only way I will paint my nails and Essie's Speed Setter top coat definitely is fast enough for me. It really does dry to the touch under a minute after application. However, I wouldn't call it completely set or cured for another hour or so. There is still the poss...ibility of dents and such if I bang it against a sharp or hard surface but I can go about doing regular tasks. This is still about as good as other fast top coats I have used that are not completely filled with a lot of questionable chemicals. I like the wide curved brush a lot and it was very easy to cover all my nails quickly. The smell was relatively light and not too offensive. I use two Essie color polish and wait a minute between coats for it to slightly dry before applying the top coat. The resulting finish is very shiny and I have not experienced any bubbles, patches or streaking. It is even pretty good at smoothing out some of the mistakes from doing my color nail polish coats. I am happy to see that Essie has reformulated so that their products are 8 free and the ingredient list for this top coat was pretty short. The bottle is packaged in recyclable cardboard which is better than plastic packaging the older products used to have. The bottle itself though still needs some improvement on being more sustainable and I wish there was more guidance on the packaging on proper disposal after the top coat is no longer usable. Overall, I am enjoying this top coat and so far have no complaints. I just hope that it doesn't dry up before I am done with half the bottle as has happened with other Essie top coats.