I scraped comments from 80+ posts where people asked “what’s the best top coat?” (plus some big nail care and manicure megathreads), then ran the whole pile of thousands of comments through an LLM pipeline to see which top coats consistently get love vs. mixed reviews. The goal wasn’t “most mentioned,” but “most positively talked about.”
Method in a nutshell:
– Scraped 80+ “best top coat?” threads & nail care megathreads
– Used GPT-5.1 + Gemini 3 to extract product names and classify sentiment
– Scoring = ~70% positive vs. negative differential + ~30% positive/total ratio
– Merged name variants so duplicates didn’t inflate results (e.g., “Seche Vite Dry Fast Top Coat,” “Seche Vite Fast Dry” → one entry)
– Added a Signal Score: combines positive/negative ratios, upvotes, and comment quality, highly upvoted or detailed praise/criticism carries more weight than quick, low-effort comments
Would love your feedback!
by LoneKnight25
13 Comments
This is actually super useful! I’ve been using the same crusty bottle of top coat for like 3 years because I never know what to buy when I run out. Bookmarking this for sure.
Essie Gel Couture at #1 doesn’t surprise me at all. That stuff is basically witchcraft. I’m a bartender and my nails go through absolute hell every shift, but with that top coat my manicure lasts a full week without chipping. The shine is insane too, people always ask if I got gel nails done professionally.
Seche Vite , IMHO, STILL deserves the crown. Nothing else is quite as good
Just want to say I LOVE the level of rigorous research that goes on in this sub.
That’s wild – in my experience, Essie Gel Couture has the worst shrinkage of any top coat I’ve used.
Loving this! OP can you please do it for best base coat as well?
I feel like this needs a big ole warning.
*your results may vary*
Personal chemistry plays a high part in which formula works. Seche vite, for example shrinks bigly on me.
Do you have testing for how accurate the llm is compared to a dedicated sentiment analysis model? I get it’s probably easier when you also have to pull out the bottle name, but I could see it tripping up on some comments, like the one from the bartender in thus post
The Holo Taco drama in the nail community is wild but honestly their products are pretty good. Cristine knows what she’s doing
Lord’s work
I tried Essie gel couture for the first time recently, although it applied lovely and the formula felt nice to work with, I didn’t think it dried that quickly and my nails didn’t feel *that* hard, like if I pressed them I would be able to leave indents in them.
No justice for Zoya Ultra Glossy Seal, it’s still the best top coat I’ve ever tried. The top two on this list gave me bad shrinkage lol.
Saving this! would love to see one for best removers and nail strengtheners