Pick Of The Crop: Seche Vite Top Coat

I know we all roll our eyes when the annual beauty awards are trotted out, as all the usual suspects are deemed to be the most fantastic thing since bread went sliced. Sometimes, though, there's a reason certain products make the cut year in, year out, and that's because they are simply the best in their class and no new releases can hold a candle to their wonderfulness.

Case in point? Seche Vite Dry Fast Top Coat, which crops up again and again on the likes of InStyle's Best Beauty Buys. It's so great. As the name suggests, it dries really bleedin' rapid - definitely the quickest drying nail varnish top coat I've ever encountered, with nails properly touch dry in mere minutes. There's a knack to applying it to ensure that you don't drag that carefully applied colour, though: you need to load a decent sized bead of top coat onto the end of your brush, set it down gently near the base of the nail, and then use the usual 3-stroke motion to apply it quite thickly over the nail. It delivers a glossy, gleaming , long-lasting shine and keeps my manicure chip free for a couple of days.

For a long time,  Seche Vite could only be got through the good peeps at HQhair, but Boots have recently started stocking it, which gladdens my little heart immensely. Expect to hand over €11.25 plus shipping if you purchase online, or about €14 instore.