Confessions of a Nail Polish Newbie--OPI Topcoat vs. Essie Faceoff Results!

If you'll recall, earlier this week I decided to see if recent issues with nail polish chipping were related to the OPI for Sephora topcoat I had been applying.  Prior to this endeavor I'd put on three coats of polish and one of the topcoat around two hours before going to bed at night.  I'd been seeing chips within 24 hours, even when using brands that usually lasted much longer for me.

Results:  Right Hand (featuring OPI for Sephora topcoat on top of three coats of Essie)

Note the gargantuan chip on the tip of my index finger--this started less than 10 hours after applying the polish, and just got worse over the next 60 hours.

Left Hand: Essie Highly Structured (3 coats) with no topcoat

You can see that I had a small amount of peeling on my pinky cuticle (and some weirdness around the ring finger cuticle as well) but only minimal tip wear.  Moreover, NO CHIPPING!

Now, I'm not ready to completely throw in the towel on OPI topcoat yet, but consider this experiment Exhibit A in OPI's keep or toss trial.  At a minimum, I'm venturing to say that this topcoat doesn't work any better than polish alone on my fingers, and may very well cause premature chipping.

Stay tuned, and in the meantime, if you have any must-try top or basecoat recommendations for me, I'd love to hear about them!

Confessions of a Nail Polish Newbie

I seem to go in phases with nail polish.  I'll be great about using it for 6-12 months, and then won't touch it again for 4-5 years.  When I started my latest round of nail polish purchases last month I hadn't worn polish in so long that the handful of polishes I still had in the back of my vanity had actually separated.  Ew. 

That said, I've never been a fan of painting my fingernails, just my toes.  Living in the Southwest, I can wear sandals at least 9 months of the year, and love the look of nicely polished toes in my pretty flip flops.  A good professional pedicure can last 2-3 weeks with minimal visible wear, which makes it worth the $25 expense in my book.  Fingernails, though, seem destined for chips within a couple of days.  No matter how much I spend on a professional manicure or fancy polish, chips happen long before I'm ready to move on to another color.

And yet, I really love how nail polish looks on my hands.  A big part of my new beauty philosophy is that time spent on my appearance isn't (as I've thought in the past) wasted time, so I've taken the plunge into painting my fingernails every 3-4 days.  I usually touch up my polish after 24-36 hours of wear, and four days is the longest I seem able to go without major chips.  I'd love to get an extra day of wear out of my polishes, but so far no dice.

So, this is my question to you: what products (base and top coats in particular) work best for your polish longevity?  Below are the products I've used so far and the results of each.  I'm planning to turn this into a weekly assessment of polishes I've been trying, and would love to hear from readers about which polishes you love and hate.

Week of October 17, 2011

Basecoats:

• Have tried: OPI brand basecoat
• Result: Failure.  Instead of lasting 3-4 days per application, my polishes started chipping badly less than 24 hours into a manicure.  

Topcoats:

• Have tried:  OPI for Sephora brand topcoat
• Result:  This seems to add a day onto my wear time, but no longer.  Frankly, I'm not terribly impressed. 

About Me

Greetings! I'm C. I've had several blogs in the past--personal and related to ugly things one could buy on the Internet--but haven't blogged about books or beauty before.

Who am I? I'm a voracious reader, and have parlayed that love of books into a career teaching high school English and an in-process M.A. in English Literature. In my spare time (what spare time?) I'm also an equal-opportunity recreational reader, and am just as likely to crack open chick lit or a romance novel as I am to settle down with Dickens or Faulkner. In other words, anything in print is fair game as far as I'm concerned.

I'm also a newcomer to the world of beauty products. At the age of 30, shortly after having my second child, I realized that I wasn't happy with how I looked. In addition to losing over 20 lbs I decided to start paying more attention to my skincare and makeup routines. This led me to the purchase of my first-ever eyeshadow (which I'll be discussing in my next entry) and I haven't looked back since. One might say I've become a trifle obsessed with all things beauty.

Makeup and books may seem like an odd combination for a single blog, but to my eye they're two sides of the same coin. My definition of feminism really boils down to the fact that I believe that being an intelligent, articulate, and erudite woman doesn't have to mean that you can't also love looking pretty. Welcome to my world of beauty and brains!