I tried this product recently after using nearly everything else on the market, and I will never use another fixative. Before this my top choice was Spectrafix, since I don't like toxic chemicals and go out of my way to avoid them if I can. Prior to the Spectrafix, every time I sprayed a fixative I had to go outside and hold my breath, and even so I felt like I needed to take a shower afterwards. However, even though I liked being able to spray it in the house, I was not happy with the results the Spectrafix gave. I found that although it will work in a pinch, it drenches your surface, buckles the paper, and doesn't really fix all that well. After several coats (with substantial drying time in between, due to all the water in the formula), you can still get a great deal of pastel off your painting with the lightest touch of a finger. It also, like most other fixatives, does change the color of the work to some degree. The Sennelier Latour, on the other hand, has none of these issues. It doesn't have all that water so you can spray it heavily without drenching, warping, or pooling on your work. It dries almost instantly, and you can also work over it while it is still wet to get a nice "grabby" effect that is not overbearing but just plain fun. Most unbelievably, it does not change the color of your piece AT ALL. Honestly, I still have trouble believing that. You can spray it all over and it looks exactly the same. I'm not sure if this would be the case if you drenched your work in it, but with as much as I have ever sprayed it, which I would say is on the high end of reasonable use, it has caused no visible change at all. With every product I have tried, this is something that I have never seen before, and never expected to. On top of that, the Sennelier is alcohol rather than turpentine or petroleum based, so you can still spray it in the house. I'm not sure it can claim the same degree of eco-friendliness as Spectrafix (which only uses an egg protein, casein, as its binding agent), but it is far from the spray varnish fixatives like Krylon, which I would never ever let anywhere near my lungs. To me, the Sennelier is about as bad as hairspray from an air-cleanliness perspective, which is to say not too bad at all. Honestly, before I tried this product I only resorted to fixative in rare cases. Now, I find myself using it all the time, and it has actually become a part of my process. I'm not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing, but I sure am enjoying being able to put that much pastel on a non-sanded paper! In short, I love this product, and it is light years ahead of everything else out there. I highly recommend it. Update: I wanted to take a moment to update this and say that while I still love this fixative and it is still definitely my top choice, I found a case where it did change my painting. I was doing a still life a month or so ago and I went WAY overboard with the fixative, spraying layer upon heavy layer of the stuff. I was experimenting more than anything else; seeing how much I could glue the pastel to the surface. Well, I went too far. It finally dulled my painting and I had to rework the top layer to get back the sparkle. It didn't really "darken" the pastel as I have seen some people say . . . it was more like it made the top layer translucent so that it seemed almost to disappear. I had some really subtle value differences and shimmeryness in the background that were basically lost. Well, I asked for it. I really sprayed on a ton. And now I know. Still, though, with all but excessive application, I continue to maintain that this is the fixative to use.
