Stash: treatment products

I went through everything else in my stash (well, almost everything, there's still more strays coming), and at the end it seemed a bit weird not to talk about the other bottles in my stash - the top-coats and the nail hardeners and other miscellaneous bottles o' stuff. This installment is the things that are neither a color polish nor specifically a base-coat or top-coat, but instead have some other purpose. Base-coats and top-coats are each going to get their own installment, also to come.

top row:

• Green Tea and Bamboo Strength (Sally Hansen Nail Nutrition) - I'm a fan of Sally H's nail treatment products, generally. Nail Nutrition has 2 formulas, Strength and Growth. I've tried both of them and I like both of them. I've mostly settled on strength formulas rather than growth for treatment products generally, because I've given up on trying for grow my nails terribly long. However, I used up a whole bottle of the growth formula before I got the strength one, and I haven't remembered to use the new one as much. The link above is from Makeup Alley and it has reviews of both. I didn't especially think the growth one helped with growth, that I could tell, I just liked the way it made my nails feel.
• VitaSurge Strength Gel (Sally Hansen) - this is a different type of product, a gel with little bubbles of stuff (vitamins, I guess!) which you're supposed to massage into your nail bed. I usually forget to use this, but I like it as far as I can tell from my limited use of it, at least! This also comes in Strength and Growth formulas, I believe, but I haven't tried the latter one, in this case. This does not come with a brush, instead it has a little sponge wand. I usually just use the sponge to spread it around and then massage it into my nails with my fingers. It claims that you will notice results after 5 days, but I would have to remember to use it for 5 days in a row, I assume, to test that claim, and that's just not going to happen.

bottom row:

• Instant Artificials (Salon Sciences) - you can buy this at beauty supplies, but this bottle came from somebody's blog sale, because I wanted to try it out for cheap. Again, I forget to use it regularly, but I like it as far as I can tell. I don't try to substitute it for a base-coat, normally, but I think this one is more like a base-coat than most of these others. (Update: Once I finally started using this, I fell in love with it. I couldn't find any new bottles in Sally's stores (although some stores may have it) but it's available on their website.)
• Beauty Secrets polish thinner - I know the bottle says Seche but what's in the bottle is not Seche. See below for the story about that. This is another one that I don't use often enough to say yea or nay on it, myself. (The link above has a lot of information about how polish thinners work, chemically-speaking, which is helpful.)
• Vitamin E Nail & Cuticle Oil (Sally Hansen) - again, I forget to use it because I usually am using the ones below. But it works fine.
• Cuticle Oil (Chick) - this is by far my favorite cuticle product - although in practice, I alternate randomly between it and Badger Cuticle Balm, which I talk about a bit more at the bottom of this entry. The Chick oil is tangerine-ginger scented and it smells divine. Unfortunately Chick is out of business to the best of my knowledge. (I did buy two bottles while these were on clearance at Llarowe, though, so I'm still good for a while. I'm sure going to miss it when it eventually runs out, though!)
• (upside down) Beauty Secrets Hardener - I have flaky, peel-prone nails, but I'm hard on my nails - as I've said here ad infinitum - and so it's hard to know how much of that is diet or body chemistry or whatever and how much is because I use my nails as tools and then bang them against a keyboard all day. But this product does seem to help, in my fairly limited trials of it. I need to use it more regularly and then I might have a better idea about how much it helps!

(I said at the top that these are not base-coats, but actually some treatment products say that you can use them instead of one. In my experience, you're better off not listening to any such claims, though. Put the treatment product on first and then a base-coat on top of that, and you'll usually get better results.)

As far as the Seche Restore bottle, I bought it from some random Amazon seller, and I didn't open it for a good while - like, a couple of months - and when I finally opened it, it was an empty bottle. I don't know who the seller was anyway, but I'm not entirely sure this should be held against them because I didn't give them a chance to make it right. It's entirely possible that they didn't know it was empty, either - it may well have just been a mistake at the bottler. And so much time had gone by that I just said, "Eh," and went and bought some Sally-Beauty-brand thinner instead, and poured some in the empty bottle. (So I have still not actually tried Seche Restore at all. I gather it's particularly good for those gooey half-empty bottles of Seche Vite.)

I didn't take a picture of my cuticle balms, because they're scattered all over, but I have three different ones, all of which I talked about over here. For practical purposes, Badger Balm is the one I use most often. It comes in quite a big tin and is hella cheap for the amount of product you get.