Best Non Toxic Nail Salon in Houston

If you’re trying to nail your go-to manicure, you’re in luck. Star manicurist and founder of the genius The By Alice Gardner nail bar and Instagram account, Caroline Deveraux, says that two little things you can do to sharpen the shine on a base coat will end up making your nail polish last days.

Essentially, the base coat she’s about to tell you to do is an essential in every nail polish professional’s handbook, but it’s one that’s so easy to forget about. In fact, just by applying it on day one of your pedicure, you’ll probably be able to manage your polish on those messy Instagram selfies.

The first thing you should do with the base coat is to make sure that it’s filled with HISS (which stands for Hardened Oil Sunkissed Textures). The consistency of the consistency is extremely important for the clarity of your manicure, because it can leak into your polish. The other two things Deveraux says you should do with the base coat is to keep it translucent and to add a pop of blue-green-yellow to it to differentiate from your natural nail color. A corresponding color, the “dot effect,” is something Deveraux calls the “safest way to be able to keep your color on your polish,” because of it’s level of glossiness.

After you’ve applied your base coat, you’ll actually be using two coats of it for your manicure, according to Deveraux. The idea is to start with one coat of HISS, give it some shine, and then come back and finish it off with the dot effect (this is something you can also do with one or two coats of your top coat, by the way). If you do that, you’ll have your polish on your nails for a week, but in a womanly way. You won’t be rocking stained nails, but if you have a particularly loving mane of red hair or wearing things with bells on them, you’ll likely have on fewer streaks of your original color and it will last longer.