Review (3/5): Good for a 1 day look
It's quite....okay...of a product. 3.5 stars out of 5. The way I plan to use it, it should last an entire day. That's a shame because I would have enjoyed 2 days of wear with the no acetone cleanup (for nails that don't experience stresses of opening sodas, scratching itches, etc, more than 2 days is entirely possible).
My experience:
This base coat made my glitter polish last for about 6 hours. I painted the base coat on my fingernails around 7pm. It dried fairly quick. I painted one entire hand and then had to wait about another minute for it to completely dry. You can easily tell when it is dry because it turns from white to matte clear. The base coat seemed to self level and dried very smooth. I painted essie shine of the times on top. One coat on most fingers, two coats on about 3 fingers maybe. Repeat for other hand.
After the polish was dried, I went about my evening. Washed my hands several times with no ill effects.
The base coat remains soft even after it dries. Scratching itches through clothing caused a bit of polish wrinkling on an index finger because of the pressure put on them. It wasn't too noticeable because I used a clear-ish glitter polish, but this could be annoying with a solid colored polish.
Taking a 10min shower at 1am that night, I noticed the polish on my index fingers and 1 thumb had lifted off after a while with the warm water running over them. The other fingers' base coats started turning a bit white (like the original product when it came out of the bottle) at the nail edges with prolonged water exposure. When I dried my hands, the base returned to clear. Peeling off the lifted polish was extremely easy. It all came off as a single "sheet" of polish.
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I've heard that if you have a nail polish that stains, you should use a normal clear coat on top of this strip-me-off base coat before applying colored polish.
I need to remove polishes after one or two days after painting because my fingers are sensitive to the pressures of nail polish "puckering" (polishes shrink ever so slightly when they dry and I feel the pressure pulling on my nails, ugg, so annoying). I only last about a day or two before it drives me so crazy I need to get rid of the polish. This base coat allows me to easily remove polishes without acetone (great for when I'm suddenly sensitive while traveling/out on the town/at work and don't want to lug an extra container of acetone & cotton balls around). If you experience this same problem of nail polish sensitivity, note that this base coat did apply a very small pressure to my nails (only very slight but noticeable pulling/shrinkage).
My conclusion is that this base coat is nice for doing a one day/several hour look. That's almost exactly what I wanted. Easy removal of polish (especially glitter polish which takes longer to remove than regular polish when using acetone). I'm thinking that after every shower/pool swim, the base&polish on heavily stressed fingernails (index fingers for me), will likely pop off. The shame is that I cannot paint my nails after work, go take a shower, go to sleep, and still expect perfect cute nail polish look the next morning (I put pressure on my nails all the time-opening sodas, scratching stuff, picking at stuff with my nails....what can I say, I have very strong nails so I've become accustomed to using them a lot).