A couple of weeks ago, I posted a comparison of 5 top coats including a couple of really great indies and the response was great. I’ve loved watching the discussion in the comments. Top coats are such a subjective thing – everyone feels slightly differently about each top coat they’ve tried and has their favourites based on all kinds of merits.

One thing I couldn’t avoid was the HK Girl recommendations. More than a dozen of you suggested I try Glisten and Glow’s top coat offering in the comments on that post alone. Luckily for me, Jill from Glisten and Glow got in touch and offered to send me a bottle so I could test it out for myself and I can happily say that it lives up to each and every one of my expectations. It’s a miracle in a polish bottle! Shiny, fast drying and a super smooth formula to boot.

On the bottle, it says that HK Girl is a Fast Drying & Super Shiny top coat and that’s exactly what this is. What sets HK Girl apart from other fast drying and shiny top coats is that it doesn’t come with any of the undesirable side effects that others commonly do such as shrinkage and thickening.

I’ve been using HK Girl for quite a while now and from my experience so far, I can confidently say that it doesn’t shrink at all and it hasn’t shown any signs of thickening and going all gloopy. The brush is a pleasure to work with so it’s very easy to get even coverage and it really makes my manicures last. I’ve been able to test out the staying power quite effectively this week and I managed to keep on a mani for just over 3 days without a single chip.

It dries to the touch within a minute or less and within 5-10 minutes it’s pretty much rock hard. In the picture above, I’ve used one coat of HK Girl over Born Pretty Holographic #11 and you can see the smooth, glossy surface of the top coat.

When using this with gritty, dense glitters I’ve found that it sinks in quite easily and doesn’t always glaze over the glitter quite as much as I’d like so I’ll probably be sticking to Rica or KBShimmer when it comes to glittery nail art. That’s really the only thing I can find wrong with this polish!