Vegan Claws

I received a bottle of Seche Vive “Instant Gel Effect” top coat to review from the folks at Nail Polish Canada. 🙂 I thought I’d do a post on my favourite use for Seche Vive: smoothing out texture polishes to make them glossy! Here it is over Zoya’s new pixie dust, Juniper!

I find it works best when you let the texture polish dry (or mostly dry), then add a layer of Gelous (from Sally Beauty), followed by the Sèche Vive. (Maybe two layers of Gelous for a really stubborn textured polish!)

Unlike Seche Vite which needs to go over wet polish, Vive is supposed to be used over dry(er) polish. So I let the Gelous dry for a couple minutes before adding the Seche Vive.

And here is an older mani with Zoya Saint and Alice, where Alice has been topcoated using the Gelous/Sèche Vive combo.

Thor in the next pic!

One caveat, the instructions say to put Sèche Vive over dry polish, but the reason I said dry(er) above is that I find it works best over semi-dry, but not fully dry polish. At least, when I tried to put a second layer of it over itself on Zoya Saint, this wrinkling happened:

So, I’m not positive if that was because it was dry before I applied more, or if Sèche Vive just doesn’t like going on top of itself!

One last pic, this is Zoya Roxy with Kissy on the tips, all smoothed with Sèche Vive. In addition to texture polishes, it does a great job on regular glitters that tend to be a bit gritty!

All that to say, although I don’t use it with every mani, I really like the Sèche Vive gel effect and it’s my go-to for smoothing glitters and textures!