the finishing touch

finishing touch

The last detail added or change made to something to make it complete. Let's not spend too much longer on this. Let's just put the finishing touch on it and get it ready for production. He's been putting the finishing touches on that painting for so long now, I'm starting to think he'll never be satisfied with it.
See also: finish, touch
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

the finishing ˈtouch(es)

the final details that make something complete: We’ve been putting the finishing touches to the party decorations.
See also: finish, touch
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary
See also:
  • finishing touch
  • leave it at that
  • let's get out of here
  • let's see
  • let's go
  • let's get the/this show on the road
  • let's talk
  • Let’s dump
  • Let's dump
  • let's dump (someone or something)
References in classic literature
All in all they are handsome animals, and added the finishing touch to the strange and lovely landscape that spread before my new home.
He possessed all the civic virtues in their very meanest form, and the finishing touch was given by a low sort of consciousness he manifested of possessing them.
But her face was a larger and freer copy, and her mouth in especial a happy divergence from that conservative orifice, a little pair of lips at once plump and pinched, that looked, when closed, as if they could not open wider than to swallow a gooseberry or to emit an "Oh, dear, no!" which probably had been thought to give the finishing touch to the aristocratic prettiness of the Lady Emmeline Atheling as represented, forty years before, in several Books of Beauty.
Meg and John happened to be standing together in the middle of the grass plot, when Laurie was seized with an inspiration which put the finishing touch to this unfashionable wedding.
To lie there helpless when Eva was expecting me, that would be the finishing touch. I should rise a maniac if ever I rose at all.
I was only seeking further information, to put the finishing touch." Evgenie Pavlovitch was silent, but Hippolyte kept his eyes fixed upon him, waiting impatiently for more.
He was an authority on the stage, skilful on the ice or the links with skate or golf-club; he dressed with nice audacity, and, to put the finishing touch upon his glory, he kept a gig and a strong trotting-horse.
One day, however, Monsieur Stangerson, as he was leaving the Academy of Science, announced that the marriage of his daughter and Monsieur Robert Darzac would be celebrated in the privacy of the Chateau du Glandier, as soon as he and his daughter had put the finishing touches to their report summing up their labours on the "Dissociation of Matter." The new household would install itself in the Glandier, and the son-in-law would lend his assistance in the work to which the father and daughter had dedicated their lives.
"I'm just finishing the finishing touches. Want to see it work?"
"He will be able to put the finishing touches on it.
A few terminated in a single fine point, and, like very delicate pencils, were employed in giving the finishing touches, or in operating upon the more sensitive portions of the body, as was the case in the present instance.
Rebecca never went across the bridge without bending over the rail to wonder and to ponder, and at this special moment she was putting the finishing touches on a poem.
Anne and Gilbert found Uncle Jim sitting on a bench outside the lighthouse, putting the finishing touches to a wonderful, full-rigged, toy schooner.
The porches purchased everything from a brace and bit to a lathe for the new tool-room and put the finishing touches to the dairy.
He was still at work on the problem, when the young surgeon returned to his cabin to put the finishing touches to his toilet.