GOSH Holographic (and how to make it last!)

So everyone knows that GOSH Holographic can be a pain for never lasting more than a day. I want to first make you all aware that this wasn’t true inspiration on my part – I read a wonderful blog post here by the Polish Insomniac – she did a topcoat sandwich which is slightly different to my technique but may well have the very same effect 🙂 so yeah 99% credit due to the Polish Insomniac!

So basically, here we have 4 coats of GOSH Holographic sandwiched between 4 coats of basecoat and 1 coat of topcoat, making 9 whole coats total. You may read this and think it’s a complete waste of time but if you want the lovely holo polish to last a couple of days it’s worth it!!

The reason I decided to use basecoat rather than topcoat (as the Polish Insomniac did) was because I’ve always heard that basecoat tends to help to stick polish down to the nail, I don’t know how true this is but it seems to make sense.

Here is what I used:

First, I put 1 coat of basecoat on my bare nail. This brand of basecoat dries super fast so I didn’t have to wait long to put on my first coat of Holographic. At 1 coat, it was very patchy. Once that was dry, I put on another coat of basecoat, then Holographic, then basecoat and so on, until my nail was opaque. I then put 1 coat of topcoat over the final coat of Holographic, to finish off.

I have two things to flag up with this polish and this technique.

The first is that GOSH Holographic drags like no other polish… even when the coats beneath are totally dry. I found the best technique was to literally just slap it on and don’t go over any point on the nail twice because that will cause a drag. I also found that while this caused a few undesirable lumps and bumps, the coats of basecoat and topcoat evened out the nail so it was totally flat, so that was good 🙂 See on this hideous picture of my thumb nail at 3 coats of Holographic, I still had drag marks:

The second issue is that when I’d put the topcoat on all my fingernails at the very end (I didn’t put topcoat on my thumb nail for the sake of comparing), I noticed that while it gave a weird and quite lovely dimension to each nail (almost like it had a layer of water over it) it did kind of take away from the holographic effect of the polish, and in some lights the polish just looked like a cloudy blue-silver colour. This picture doesn’t really demonstrate this but you can see that the thumb nail reflects a lot more holographic-ness than my fingernails:

I mean it’s not too bad and the nails still have the holographic effect, and I presume that the topcoat increases staying-power on the nails, but I didn’t notice any difference between the lasting-power of my finger nails and thumb nail so… up to you guys 🙂

So I really hope this helps someone, I don’t tend to wear my polish for more than 2 days usually but I know a lot of people do, so hopefully this will be of use. I also wanted to mention that the whole process is quite quick because the basecoat I use (Rimmel Stronger Double Duty) dries very quickly, as does GOSH Holographic and indeed the topcoat I used. So all in all I think it took me 45mins to 1hr, including drying-time.

Another thing you could try is tip-wrapping, but I’ve never mastered the art of this so I’ll leave you with this link on how to do it!

GOSH Holographic is a fabulous polish, it’s such a shame it was discontinued but I managed to find mine a few months back in a little Superdrug in my town, so keep looking for it 🙂 I don’t quite know why it’s so ‘desirable’ that people spend £20+ on it on eBay as a fair few other polish brands (Nubar, China Glaze, Nfu-Oh, among others) do silver holos that are more or less the same as far as I can see but there we go!

Hope you are all doing well chickies, I went for a wonderful manicure yesterday and my nails look fabulous, but I will do a blog post on that soon 😀

Emma x

Disclaimer: Everything mentioned in this blog post was either bought by myself with my own money, or given to me as a gift from friends/relatives. All opinions expressed here are my own.