Diet Coke Quorn

Another food post for you today!

Something I cook quite often is Diet Coke Quorn. The first time I heard about cooking with Diet Coke, I thought it sounded a) gross and b) insane. Coke's a drink, right? Why would you put it in your food? But I was intrigued enough to try it, and surprised when it tasted amazing. It's kind of like sweet and sour.

 This dish is vegetarian. It's not technically vegan since Quorn contains a small amount of egg white, but I'm putting it up anyway because the Quorn could easily be replaced with tofu, extra vegetables, soya pieces, tempeh, chick peas/garbanzo beans, chunks of vegan sausage, or whatever else you fancy. (It could also be replaced with chicken).

It's also probably not the most attractive thing to look at, but trust me. It tastes awesome and is stupidly easy to cook.

Recipe:
Throw one large, chopped up onion into a pan with 1tsp oil, or if you're low fat, a few sprays of Frylight and a splash of water. Fry for a minute or two until soft.
Dump 225g of rice into the pan (I used long grain, brown basmati, but it doesn't really matter what you use). Add one can of diet cola (I am far too cheap to buy actual Coke - I use cheapie own brand supermarket stuff and it works just fine), and watch the cool fizzing effect.
Add 240ml of water and a vegetable stock cube. Toss in some Quorn pieces (or whatever you want to use instead) and some vegetables (whatever you have hanging around is fine. I used carrots and red peppers here).
Simmer until the rice is cooked (time will vary depending on the type of rice you chose but it'll be somewhere between 10 and 25 minutes) and has absorbed all the liquid. You will need to keep an eye on it, stir it every so often, and probably top up the pan with a bit of extra water here and there, unless you really want half cooked rice welded to the bottom of the pan.
Eat. This made enough for three very filling portions, and cost very little. My husband (meat eater) ate two out of those three portions. He is always happy to eat vegetarian food as long as it fills him up and tastes good, so that's a great recommendation right there. Oh, and if you follow the Slimming World Green/EE Plan and use FryLight instead of oil, this dish is Syn Free!

Barry M : Silvery Lilac

I have an unusual polish to share with you today: Silvery Lilac, from Barry M.

I don't usually get on all that well with lilac polishes - they give me lobster hands. But this one is a foil, and I love foils, plus it's unusual to find a foil amongst the drugstore brands that isn't just silver or gold. Also, it's a duochrome. Foil AND duochrome?? Sold. 

This is a real chameleon polish, almost a multichrome; in some lights it appears silver, in others a dusty lilac, sometimes a sort of shimmery gunmetal shade, and at certain angles it even looks green. Although in the bottle the green flash is quite obvious, it's less visible on the nail, but not completely lost. It's very sheer, but three coats is enough to reach opacity. These pictures are of three coats, and you can still see a little VNL, but it's not visible in real life.

This shot shows the green duochrome flash quite nicely. It's a subtle effect, but adds an ethereal sort of 'glow' to the polish that makes me think of fairies or unicorns.

Application is pleasant, but not perfect. It goes on nicely, not too thick or thin, and the brush is decent. I didn't need to do any clean up with this one. It is a little prone to bubbling though, and the drying time could be faster, so several thin coats are preferable to fewer thick ones (you can see on my index finger where I got a bit impatient and used a thicker coat, resulting in a few bubbles, though again this is invisible in real life. Cameras are not kind!). 

Please excuse the blurry camera phone shot here - I wanted to show how Silvery Lilac becomes a darker lilac/gunmetal kind of shade when lit indirectly, and I found that my camera phone was better at capturing the lilac tones in this polish. My digital camera preferred to see the silvery side :-p

Pros: 

I loved the colour and had a lot of compliments on it too. It's shiny and pretty and unusual, but in a muted kind of way - you could still wear this to work, for instance.

Wear was great - 3 days in, no topcoat, and I am only just starting to see tipwear.

Cons:

The formula could be better. It's sheer. Though I wonder if that would make it good for layering... hmmm...

Prone to bubbling (though only very slightly, can be avoided by careful application)

Stash or Trash?

Stash. I really like this polish and will be experimenting with it for layering too.

Ebalay Golden Green

Good morning, beauties!
My card reader is finally here (after a two week wait and three increasingly irritated emails to the company I bought it from! It was meant to be next day delivery, what a joke!) and guess what? The polish I put on to review for you all just WON'T play nicely with my camera. No matter what I try, I can't get the colour to look right. Luckily my camera phone seems much more accommodating and the colour looks a lot more accurate, but how frustrating to wait all that time and still not use my proper camera!

Anyway, enough ranting. I have another polish from Ebalay to show you, courtesy of KKCenterHK. Just like all of Ebalay's polishes it doesn't have a proper name, just a number, but KKCenterHK have given it the description 'Golden Green'.

In the bottle (which reminds me of an OPI one) it does indeed have a gold/green colour, with a pinky/purply duochrome shift. I tried it on its own and it is incredibly sheer. After 5 coats I still had a ton of VNL. The colour was sort of pretty, but I didn't like the colour enough to warrant the zillion coats it would need to achieve opacity (and it didn't look good left with the VNL). Undeterred, I layered it over black to see if that made a difference, because many duochromes look better with black underwear. (Again, pictures are taken on a camera phone, so please excuse their slight dodginess)

CHECK OUT THE PRETTY!!

I almost fainted when this gorgeous, emerald, super-sparkly colour appeared. Where was this hiding in that bottle of goldish murk??

It's not just green, either. There's a strong shift to purple in some lights (which even my camera phone struggled to capture, but in real life it's a lot more obvious.

All the pictures in which I managed to catch the purple are blurry. Hopefully you can still appreciate how pretty this polish is despite the blur.

There's almost no trace of the gold colour in the bottle: the green is a definite rich emerald colour. But sooooo pretty. Lots of people complimented me on this manicure.

What I liked about Golden Green:

- Over black, it's a stunning green/purple duochrome, very sparkly and eyecatching

- As well as the OPI like bottle, it has a brush similar to OPI too. Application was pretty easy.

- Drying time was pleasantly fast, even with multiple layers

- Wear was pretty good. I didn't get tipwear until day three and no chips at all.

What I didn't like about Golden Green:

- I don't think the formula is 3-free. It pongs a bit!

- It's so sheer that you have to layer it to avoid VNL. Unless you have very short nails, bottle colour without VNL would only be possible if you layered it over something like a nude or maybe a gold colour.

Overall this is a really gorgeous polish and worth buying for the effect over black alone.

Golden Glow is available HERE from KKCenterHK. It's priced quite reasonably at £4.60 ($7.24),  KKCenterHK also offer a 10% discount until the 31st January 2013 to anybody using the code glitter-mountain at the checkout. (Use of this code does not benefit me in any way)

Disclaimer: this polish was sent to me as a free sample for consideration. My opinions remain my own and are unaffected by this.

Rimmel 60 Seconds : Camouflage

Happy Easter everyone!
Having got all creative with the lighting in my last couple of reviews, of course my lamp went and broke on me today so you're all going to have to endure some rather naff natural lighting pics (naff because it's really gloomy outside today) that don't really show the true beauty of what I'm photographing. Sorry about that.
But in more exciting news, I've ordered a light tent and some new lamps!! I'm looking forward to playing with them and hopefully taking lots of lovely bright pictures once they arrive. Anyway, on to the polish!

Today I'd like to share another Rimmel offering (I promise I'll run out of steam with Rimmel eventually!) : Camouflage, from the 60 seconds fast drying range.

In the bottle it's a pretty emerald/leaf green frost with noticeable gold shimmer - a bit like GOSH Golden Dragon or maybe one of the various green/gold duochromes that're around at the moment (though this is not actually a duochrome). I thought it was really beautiful, (though nothing like any camouflage I've seen, since that tends to be more murky greens, but never mind eh) but once I got it on my nails I was surprised to find it's even nicer thean it is in the bottle (a nice change, actually, since so many polishes are the other way round!).

On the nail, the colour shifts slightly. The gold shimmer is less prominent but the green becomes a LOT more vivid and jewel toned. Instead of green with gold shimmer in it, it appears more of an intense, almost metallic green with gold/yellow tones. It changes according to the light; sometimes darker, sometimes lighter, different shades of green from leaf to emerald to that sort of green that makes you think of Christmas. It's really very eye catching, especially when the sunlight hits it directly and you get this glowing effect:

(Sorry it's blurry - this was the only close up shot I could get that was colour accurate as well as showing the inner glow). This is also one of those polishes that looks a lot better with topcoat than it does without. The topcoat seems to bring out the glow and the depth of the colour and gives it more of that 'wow' factor.

Application and formula are surprisingly good. I was actually dreading it a little since the other 60 Second polishes I've tried have tended to be reaaaaallly slow drying, thick and gloopy (since they try and be opaque in one coat, but aren't, and then you have to use two and the drying time becomes a nightmare). But happily, Camouflage seems to be exempt from this trend: it's a little thick, but not gloopy, and it's definitely not what I'd call fast drying (especially not if you consider their 60 second claim, which couldn't be further from the truth). But it's alright... it's not overly slow drying either; just 'normal'. The second coat dries quicker if you wait for the first one to be completely dry first. 

 It has that nice wide, round ended 'pro' type brush that reminds me of OPI and Rimmel's Lycra Pro range, which splays out nicely and covers the nail in a good, even coat of not-too-thick polish that dries without leaving brush marks. The rounded bristles and thicker formula make it easy to apply without flooding cuticles - all these pictures are without any cleanup (since I was in a hurry!).

Overall, this is a really stunning polish which has to be seen in real life to really appreciate how vivid it looks - it's especially gorgeous in sunlight (which of course was in scarce supply when I was trying to take pictures). Application is pretty good, not one of the best I've tried but definitely not the worst either. If I had to pick on one thing to complain about it would be the wear - two coats over Nail Envy, with one coat of top coat (Orly Sec 'N' Dry, which normally wears like iron) showed quite noticeable tip wear after 24 hours. It didn't chip though, so I added one more coat and it lasted me easily though the second day before the tipwear reappeared. Considering what a gorgeous colour this is, it's definitely worth putting up with the less than perfect wear and I will be putting this one in the 'keep' pile!

Ebalay : Olive Gold Dust

Hey, I'm back! Finally! Sorry I've been quiet for so long, it's been completely mad around here and blogging has been pretty much impossible. But I've missed you all and I'm back at last!

Today I have a special manicure to show you : 'Olive Gold Dust' from Ebalay. You'll have to excuse the number of pictures: it's absolutely gorgeous outside today and when the sun shines, it's a lot easier to take nice pictures of manicures!

This beautiful polish came from KKCenterHK. (Click HERE or the banner below to check out their website). When I saw this pretty olive/gold shade I knew I had to try it right away! KKcenterHK is located in Hong Kong and I'm in the UK: when I've ordered things from Hong Kong in the past it's sometimes taken a long time to get here but this only took about a week to arrive. Not bad for such a long journey.

The colour is really just called 'EBALAY 020' - not such an exciting name :( But the website describes it as Olive Gold Dust and I'd say this is pretty accurate so that's what I'm calling it from now on. In the bottle it's an olive green with dense, fine gold glitter. On the nail it loses some of the green and the gold becomes more dominant, though the green is still definitely there.

The glitter is so fine that I almost thought it might be a holo once I got it into the sunshine; it has that same sort of muted yet grainy appearance in the bottle that you see with polishes like GOSH holographic. Sadly it isn't holo at all, but it is extremely pretty and catches the sunlight beautifully. Because the glitter is fine, it's not too in your face; it's classy as well as sparkly and you could easily wear it to work.

Application looked like it might be a pain when I opened the bottle: the polish is pretty thick and I have to say I expected it to be gloopy and slow drying - but actually, it went on really smoothly and evenly. It's also so pigmented and full of glitter that you could easily use this as a one coat polish! (All pictures here are two coats, over Nail Envy, with Orly Sec'N'Dry topcoat).

Drying time was good, too. I thought I'd be there for ages waiting for the second coat to dry; but it took no longer than any other (thinner) polish. I did use quick drying topcoat, but not until the second coat was already touch dry. The brush was quite thick and soft and reminded me a little of an OPI brush. Mine was a little bent to one side, but it didn't make it any harder to paint my nails.

The bottle is a generous 15ml for £4.30 / $6.92 so you're getting a good amount of polish for quite a cheap price; in the UK this is about the same sort of price you'd pay for a low to mid range polish brand like Rimmel or Maybelline, but you'd probably get 5-10ml for that price so this is pretty good value.  

In the shade, the glitter is much less obvious; it looks more like a suede effect/textured metallic, or perhaps a glitter that's had a matte top coat added. It's still very pretty though.

It kind of looks like a sandy texture here, doesn't it? Like I dipped my nails in gold dust and it stuck, hence the name! Actually when it dries, it's got a slightly sandy feel to it - not gritty, but not completely smooth. This went away when I added the topcoat, though.

Close up bottle shot, to show the fine glitter! It's greener than this in real life, but my camera couldn't cope with showing that plus all the glitter all at the same time.

Overall, I really like this polish. It's a lovely yet slightly unusual colour, applies nicely and so far in 5 days of wear (including doing laundry, typing, washing my hands and general household chores) I haven't had any chips OR tipwear. It still looks like the day I first applied it. I couldn't really find any faults with it, other than I wish it had a proper name instead of a number and the formula could do with being a bit thinner. It also smells quite strong. I was also a bit confused because the bottle says 'Rose Water' on the bottom, as did the other bottle I was sent, yet neither polish is scented in any way. I guess they just have rose water as an ingredient?

EDIT: KKCenterhk have kindly offered any readers of Glitter Mountain a 10% discount on all their products until the 31st of January 2013. Just use the code glitter-mountain at the checkout! (please note, using this code does not benefit me in any way)

This is a PR sample sent to me for review by KKCenterhk. The opinions I have given are my own, honest and unbiased.

17 Fast Finish : Sulk

Today's mani is from Boots 17 : 'Sulk', from its autumn/fall collection 'A Woman Scorned'. 

(Please excuse my cuticles; I'm using the world supply of hand cream and cuticle butter right now but apparently they don't care. Stupid winter >.<)

Sulk is a gorgeous jewel tone green; in the bottle it looks closer to turquoise but once on the nail it dries most definitely green. And shimmery. It's not quite so sparkly in real life as it appears in these pictures, but it's most definitely there.

Application is average. There's nothing special about the brush (it's not bad, it does the job well enough, but I did notice the neck of the bottle is small enough that the brush tends to catch on it and get all splayed out. Not really a big deal but you do have to be careful if you don't want polish everywhere). The consistency is a little thick, not unpleasantly so, but it's gloopy enough that it does make it hard to do thin coats (I like thin coats. Not everybody does, though, so if you're a medium to thick coater, this one will be perfect for you!). Sulk is nicely pigmented; two coats is more than enough and it wears well too, BUT it's very far from the 'fast finish' the bottle promises you. This mani is one coat of nail envy, two of sulk, and after 15 minutes it was still really tacky. Like, 'has it even started to dry yet' tacky. So I added a coat of Orly Sec'N'Dry and that fixed things.

Or so I thought.

Check out the sheet mark on my index finger!! And I didn't go to bed for FOUR HOURS after I painted my nails! The bottle shots were taken straight after painting, and these other two were taken after I woke up the next morning. All I can think is that this nail must have had an extra thick coat of Sulk, and even the Sec'N'Dry couldn't save it from doom. (Though I will say that the mark is less obvious in real life than it seems here).

This polish gets 5 out of 10 overall. It's a gorgeous colour; there aren't too many jewel toned greens out there (at least in drugstore brands) that are properly green; most of them lean a lot more towards teal/turquoise/blue tones than this one does. It's also cheap and cheerful at £2.99. But I didn't enjoy the application much and it took way too long to dry for a so called fast dry polish. If you don't rush it and keep your coats thin, plus use a fast dry topcoat, it'll be fine - just don't reach for this one when you only have 5 minutes to paint your nails!

Collection 2000 Hot Looks - Spangles

I must apologise for not posting much recently; it's all been a bit manic here with the lead up to Christmas, mad shopping and trying to get work done so I can have 2 weeks off, and quite frankly, swatching hasn't happened much! I've painted my nails intending to photograph them, then life happened and by the time I had the opportunity to take pix, the polish was all chipped. Anyway, hopefully I can make up for it with the posts I've got lined up waiting for you :)

Today's polish isn't even slightly festive looking! I wanted to post lots of Christmassy swatches but nearly all my gorgeous festive polishes are the kind that my camera refuses to work with. So here, for your viewing pleasure, is a polish with a festive name but a very non festive appearance. Yuletide sparkle will have to wait until the new year (4 days til the new camera, people! I'm so excited I might burst!)

Spangles is one of Collection 2000's Hot Looks polishes, which means cheap and cheerful, quick drying, brightly coloured bottles with a teeny price that more than makes up for any other failings it might have. This one is a particularly bright shade of Acid/Lime/Shrek the Ogre Green (did anyone else expect it to be glittery with a name like Spangles? I know I did, but hey ho. Not the first time a polish was oddly named).

It applies a bit weirdly - I don't know if my bottle was just old, but it tended to be a bit gloopy and even stringy in places. Despite the gloop, it still needed three coats to be properly opaque due to its tendancy to dry patchy and show VNL. Drying time was average; not particularly fast despite its fast dry label, but not painful either. Once dry, it was actually pretty decent to wear - although in these pictures it looks a bit blobbed on and uneven, it actually looks much smoother in real life, and it wore well without chipping for two days.

Now, I know it kind of gives me red lobster hands (mmm, attractive), and maybe lime green isn't really my colour, but I actually quite like this polish. It's cheap and cheerful, a fun and unusual colour, and it makes me smile. It's not the best formula I've ever seen, but it's not terrible either and at the grand price of £1.79 you can't really complain!

Rimmel 60 Seconds : Green with Envy

Today's polish has driven me insane for two days now. It's almost impossible to get a good, colour accurate picture of it - I thought it was my camera at first, but looking at other swatches online, I see that everyone else has the same problem. So... you might have to bear with me here. I've managed to get the colour more or less right, but only with some pretty unusual settings and lighting ('antique warm' effect with daylight white balance settings under fluorescent lighting in the ladies' loo, anyone?), so these pictures are a little odd looking!

Green with Envy is one of Rimmel's fast dry polishes from their 60 second range. It's a very pretty, vivid metallic jewel toned green that leans towards the turquoise/aqua end of the spectrum. Whenever you try to photograph it, it comes out as a strongly blue toned turquoise with almost no green whatsoever.

This is the most colour accurate picture I could get. Please excuse the horrible lobster red fingers and the way that the picture makes my cuticles look like a rat chewed them; it's a side effect of the bizarre settings I had to use just to make this polish look green. (And it's still not quite right: in real life the green is a little stronger).

Application is a pain. The brush is nice (it's one of those slightly wider ones that make application easier), but the polish itself is a little too thick, and it's prone to brush marks and bubbling (see that huge bubble on my index finger there?). I think this is probably because the bottle claims it's a one coater, hence the thicker formula to try and get away with one coat, but really you need two - one coat on its own wasn't anywhere near bottle colour and had visible streaking.

Drying time is a lot longer than the 60 seconds they claim, but it's nothing a coat of quick drying top coat can't cure (I used Orly Sec 'N' Dry), and once dry, wear is actually quite good. The bottle shots in this review were taken after 48 hours and a lot of typing, and as you can see there is just a little tip wear and no chipping.

Overall, I like this polish a lot, despite the fact it's a bit tricky to apply. The colour is really pretty and I haven't seen too many like this in other brands. I'll definitely wear it again (unless I can find a less tricky dupe elsewhere!)

Color Club : Sugar Plum Yum

A festival of glitter for you today: Color Club Sugar Plum Yum, from the Scent-Suous holiday collection 2011. This collection is exclusive to Sally Beauty Supply and took a lot of people by surprise, mostly because it just kind of appeared one day with next to no fanfare and very little promotion at all. The whole collection is Christmas themed and scented, with three chunky glitters and three foils, and when I saw swatches online I knew I had to try and get them all!

Sugar Plum Yum is a fun combination of hexagon glitters: green (small pieces) and purple (various larger sizes) that smells like fruity candy (I assume it's meant to be sugar plums but I don't know what those actually smell like in real life!). It's also a tease: I took a million pictures of this polish and never quite managed to capture how insanely sparkly and pretty it is in real life. My camera was so overwhelmed by the glitter that it simply refused to focus properly!

Application is.... interesting (though with glitter this chunky, it was never going to be that straightforward!). You can apply it like a regular polish if all you want is a few decorative hexagons over the top of another colour, but if you want a full on glitter mani like this, you're going to have to adopt the 'blob' approach. Scoop out a blob of glitter, plonk it on the centre of the nail, then use the brush to  spread it around a little like you're icing a cake. Luckily, the glitter in this polish is very dense, so this approach is opaque in two coats if you're careful (though you might have to go back and fill in a couple of bare patches here and there).

You may well recoil in horror at the thought of two thick layers of goopy glitter on your nails, visions of an 8 hour drying time flashing before your eyes, but actually it's not that bad. Drying time was impressively fast and the whole thing was dry in about the same amount of time as you'd wait for three coats of regular polish (though not a fast drying variety). Once it's dry, you're left with a very rough surface; the larger hexagons tend to be rather curly and don't lie completely flat on the nail. This wouldn't bother me that much (I'm prepared to forgive a lack of smoothness for the awesome sparkle!) except the glitter kept catching on my hair, so I added two thick coats of Orly Sec 'N' Dry as top coat and the surface was significantly smoothed - still a little bumpy, but I think another coat of Sec 'N' Dry would actually have sorted that out and it'd have been almost as smooth as a non glitter manicure. Interestingly, the top coat seemed to make the glitter sparkle even more!

(Picture taken in different lighting to try and show the sparkle: you can see the purple much better here).

I was a little nervous about these being scented polishes: I've had ones in the past that you could smell three rooms away and which gave me a headache, but happily the scent on Sugar Plum Yum is much more subtle than that and you only really smell it if you put your nails near your face: not so weak that you wonder what the point in bothering with the scent was, but not so strong as to be invasive. Conversely, I could still smell it after those two layers of top coat and the strength was only slightly diminished. My son was most excited about the polish being scented and kept wanting to sniff my nails!

One last attempt to show the glitter, which shows up much better when the image is extremely blurred! This polish really is insanely sparkly and earned me a million compliments. I kept staring at my nails just to see them twinkling ^-^

SpaRitual Emerald City

Firstly, a warning. This swatch was done with my right hand... the Hand You Never See. Mainly because I broke a nail on my swatching hand, right down to the quick, and it's going to be a while before I can inflict the sight of it upon the world. It's beyond nubbin territory into 'wow, I didn't realise you bit your nails, Opalline'. So for now, it's Right Hand Swatching all the way. Now, I have a skin condition known as Psoriasis, which, as a side effect, makes my nails grow very fast, but with pitting. It doesn't really affect my swatching hand, but it does affect the other one. See the ring finger, there? See how it looks like I dented the polish about 20 times? And that dent in the middle finger? Ignore those. It's not the polish's fault :(

Also, I am still nursing my cuticles. You wouldn't think that these fingers have been lavished daily with all sorts of nourishing treatments, because they still don't look that great, but believe me this is a big improvement to two weeks ago. This hand was much worse than my swatching hand as it took the brunt of the chemical abuse I put my hands through. You can still see on my index finger where it was so bad it drew blood! My poor little cuticles!

Anyway, on to the swatching. Hopefully you won't be too traumatised!

I think I've said before that I love SpaRitual polishes in general, with their eco/vegan/natural vibe and their choice of beautiful colours (this is one of the first brands I reach for when I want something pretty yet muted).

This is one of the many shades I own, Emerald City.

I feel this polish is rather oddly named (I don't know about you, but 'Emerald' in a name makes me think of a darker, richer green, or at least something more jewel toned), but we'll let it off because it's a really pretty colour anyway. In some lights it looks a little teal, in others a little turquoise, but it's not really either - if I had to pin it right down, I'd say it was a slightly minty Spring Green, too vivid to be a pastel and too pale to be a jewel shade. It occupies a niche somewhere in between that's happily not too overpopulated by other brands - I haven't seen many others like this.

Although the bottle states that it's a creme, it's more like a jelly, and the first coat is disturbingly sheer (plus has the effect of giving you rather impressive zombie/swamp/alien nails). This sheerness makes it a three or even four coater: the pictures here show three coats over one of Nail Envy (no topcoat), it's pretty much opaque at three but there's still just enough visible nail line that it could really have done with a fourth. However, this aside, it applies nicely enough and dries reasonably quickly and is nice and glossy once dry.

Bottle shot: this was taken two days after the first. For some reason the VNL is more visible in this picture: it wasn't quite that obvious in real life). You can also see that there is a little tip wear but no real chipping.

Overall this is a lovely polish. The formula could be a little better (less sheer would be nice) but the colour is gorgeous, the finish is nice and the wear is good. Definitely a keeper!

Rimmel London Lyrcra Pro Colour Memory: Peppermint

Today's mani is actually three days old; the moment I first laid brush to nail the skies opened up and it's done nothing but rain ever since. I've taken a million indoors pictures and none of them do justice to the awesome minty green of this polish, but with rain continuing to fall and my fingers itching to change my mani to another colour, I've decided to post the best I've got for now and replace them with better ones when the sun is shining!

Rimmel Lycra Pro polishes are a favourite of mine; they generally have a decent, easy to work with formula, a not too slow drying time, they go on evenly and they last longer than most of the other polishes in my stash (although I'm not sure about the ten day claim they make; I never keep a polish on that long!). They also come with the awesome maxi brush: a super wide brush with a rounded end that makes application dead easy, two swipes and the nail's covered, with nice tidy cuticles and not much need for clean up, if any. Up until recently the colours available in this range tended to be mostly vampy darks, play-safe pinks and the obligatory basic red, coral and nude shades - but all that has changed now as Rimmel have reformulated the range to include an 'anti colour fade' ingredient (not that I ever noticed it fading in the first place) and introduced some new, bright and cheerful shades for summer, including this eye catching fresh minty green: 'Peppermint'.

I loved this colour in the bottle, though once on my nails I loved it a little less - it seemed to lose some of it's zing. Although in all honesty this is probably because of my skin tone; I'm quite olive skinned and pale greens and other pastels don't always suit me. Application was good, two coats was enough to be completely opaque, it dried within 20 minutes even though the creme is quite thick and.. well... creamy (!), something that can sometimes slow drying time down. The finish was a semi-glossy satin 'sheen' like you often get with pastel cremes like this one. Pictures you see here are without topcoat, and as you can see after three days of wear and no top coat, there are no chips and next to no sign of tip wear.

Layering: Revlon Gold Get 'Em over Avon Green With Envy

Morning everyone!

Today I want to show you this accidental layering that I did just to test out the bottle of Revlon: Gold Get 'Em I bought at the weekend. I wondered what the finish was like, so I painted it over one nail of my existing mani for a quick look-see and I liked the effect so much I kept it and did the other 9 the same!

On it's own, Gold Get 'Em is a really sheer, shimmery gold (I'll do a post with it on its lonesome at a later date) but layered over the dark green of Green With Envy, it transforms into a beautiful rich colour that reminds me of aged copper verdigris.

It's bronzey and shiny and antique-metallic and (I'm told) expensive looking; I had quite a few compliments on this manicure :)

Avon Nailwear Pro: Green with Envy

Morning all!

Today's mani is Avon Nailwear Pro in Green with Envy. Here we have two coats of basecoat and two coats of polish.

I have quite a few Avon polishes and they tend to vary in quality/longevity (the older ones I own are terrible for chipping but they seem to have improved their formula recently and the newer ones are much improved) -  this is one of the newer, and better ones I own. It's a very, very dark green creme (and quite hard to photograph without it just looking black -hence the strange lighting in these pictures, which was the only way I could seem to get the green to show). There isn't any shimmer or glitter, just a plain rich green which dries very glossy (all these pictures are without topcoat) and is opaque in two coats although you could get away with just one thick one if you preferred.

Green with Envy comes in the same standard 12ml square bottle as most Avon polishes. It goes on quite smoothly, although it's a little runny for my tastes - which makes it harder to do an even, thin coat without it blobbing all over the place. Because of this, both coats I applied were quite thick and took a long time to dry. I waited 45 minutes after the 2nd coat before going to bed - and woke up with not-too-bad-but-definitely-there sheet marks on the hand I did last :(

Two days after dong this mani I was still chip-free and the polish looked great, with only slight tip wear despite the lack of top coat. (Pictures were taken at the two day mark - you might be able to see the wear if you look closely). I think I'll get at least another two days out of it before the wear is too much to put up with.

Interestingly, Avon in the US uses different names for some of their polish colours- Green With Envy is the UK name, I'm not sure what it's called across the pond. But it's the only dark green they have so it shouldn't be too hard to spot!