Top coat and base coat

I'm no expert on the technical aspects of nail polish, not at all. (Loodie is the nail blogger I think of who falls most into that category.) But I thought I'd talk a bit about top coat and base coat, from my experience.

I was thinking this morning (while I was waiting on my nail polish to dry) about how much the climate I live in makes a difference here - when people online talk how long it takes their polish to dry, most of the time it's considerably less than I find it is for me. But I live in the land of high humidity (on the Gulf Coast) and presumably that's the main reason for the difference. I spend a LOT of time waiting for nail polish to dry. (I tend to do something like read during that time, or goof around on the computer. Keeps me from picking up something else that might be more likely to mess my nails up.)

I like Sally Hansen's basic Insta-Grip and Insta-Dri base coat and top coat, but I haven't been using either of them lately. I do have a half-empty and slightly gooey bottle of Insta-Grip that's my backup basecoat these days, but when I went to the grocery store to buy another one, they were out. My grocery store has a whole aisle of nail polish, so they usually have a lot of selection, but that day they were sadly short on base coats. They also happened to be out of Orly Bonder, and a couple of other things I thought to look for, but they did have Sally Hansen Complete Salon base coat, so that's what I came home with. I had never used it before, but like most things Sally Hansen, I quite like it. It seems to do a good job - of course it costs more than Insta-Grip, too, so it should!

I have several different top coats I've been using, but since Fleck Effect also doubles as a top coat, I've been using that most of the time and not using the general-purpose ones. (I like the way that multiple coats of Fleck Effect looks - I was using three, a lot of the time during the summer - and a nice side effect of that was that it really makes your polish wear well. I am rather famously hard on my nails, so I like anything that'll extend wear life!)

Today's (redone again) version of the Rage combo I keep talking about is:

1. base coat (SH Complete Salon)
2. Flagstone Rush
3. Rage
4. Rage
5. Orly Pearl Wisdom
6. Orly Diamond Love (both of these last two are pretty sheer, I couldn't tell that either one changed the color significantly)
7. and for good measure, Chloe (and even Chloe only shows up a little - I see a flash of it occasionally, but that's all)

Small update: I found somebody talking about Rage on YouTube who also said that Rage looks different in the bottle - here. (I hadn't seen her videos before, but I like that one.)