Rimmel I Love Lasting Finish : Tangy Tangerine

Today's manicure is a sweet Rimmel I picked up a couple of weeks ago when I was in Asda (well, a girl's got to have treats to get her through the weekly grocery shop, right?). Although I'm not really into orange as a colour in general, it's really been growing on me as a manicure colour these last few months and when I saw this one, Tangy Tangerine, I had to just slip it into my basket.

Now I don't normally get on that well with pastel colours like baby pink and lilac (they look funny against my olive skin tone), and let's face it, the nail polish market is fairly saturated with those sorts of colours too. This one just seems a little bit more unusual, though... a pastel orange? Yes, please :) I love that it's bright, yet muted at the same time: a good colour to try if you want to dabble in the summery bright citrus polishes out there, yet don't want to take the plunge into full on neon territory.

Unfortunately the application was a lot more of a pain than I've come to expect from Rimmel's I Love Lasting Finish formula; it tended to be streaky despite the fact it's well pigmented, and needed to be applied quite thickly to counteract this. This is pretty standard for most pastels, though; I don't think I've used one yet that was a dream to apply. These pictures show three coats, over one coat of Nail Envy, with a top coat of Orly Sec 'N' Dry. Even with the Sec 'N' Dry it took ages to dry completely, something which is demonstrated quite well by the sheet mark on my middle nail, obtained when I went to the bathroom over an hour later :-/

What I liked about Tangy Tangerine:
It's a really pretty colour - bright enough to be eyecatching but muted enough you could still wear it at the office. I love that it's an orange pastel - definitely less common than some of the bog standard baby pinks and lilacs out there.
It wears well once it's completely dry. Two days in and no tipwear yet.
The brush is nice. Not as nice as their rounded pro brushes or the mini versions of the pro that come with their 60 second polishes, but it's soft enough and wide enough to flatten out nicely on the nail and give you good coverage and a tidy cuticle line. The pictures above show no clean-up whatsoever.

What I didn't like about Tangy Tangerine:
Like most other pastels, it manages to be both thick and streaky at the same time.
It takes forever to dry, mostly because it's thick.

Keep it or Bin it?
Keep, unless somebody comes out with a very similar colour without the application problems. It's a really good pedi colour too, really summery and cheerful :)

Barry M Nail Paint : Berry Ice Cream

Okay so firstly let me apologise up front for the quality of these pictures; I'm still stuck taking pictures on a not very good camera, and although I normally edit my pictures on a computer, this time I tried to do it with the camera's built in editing software. It was meant to just be an experiment to see how the software fared  (I think we know the answer to that one, sigh) and didn't realise that it wouldn't keep the original images. And by the time I realised this, I'd taken off the mani and painted my nails another colour. I'll try and revisit this one another time when I have my new camera (a much awaited christmas present), but for now, here's a lesson in how NOT to take pictures of a manicure.

The poor long suffering nail polish that I've put through this indignation is Berry Ice Cream, from Barry M.

(Image manipulation lesson one: do not use an app that, on cropping an image, automatically blows up what you've got left over to the point everything turns pixellated and blurry. Those are my nails, in case you can't tell any more :-/ )

Berry Ice Cream is aptly named, since it makes me think of ice cream or milkshakes when I look at it. It's a  pink toned lilac creme that's mostly opaque in one coat, although a little prone to bald spots which is why I've used two coats here. It comes in the standard Barry M square bottle with a standard thin brush, nothing revolutionary here although it applies nicely enough, with its thick creamy formula (something that seems to be common amongst pastel toned polishes in general) you don't really need special brushes as you won't have too many problems getting the polish to go (and stay) where it's supposed to be. Like many other pastels, it also takes a while to dry - not unbearably so, but enough that you can't just slap it on and forget about it. It's also rather prone to denting for a while after it's touch dry. This is probably because the thick formula prevents the polish from being applied thinly, so everything just takes longer.

(Lesson two: don't let the app decide to alter your colour balance. The polish will look about the right colour, which is a bonus, but your hand will take on a weird greenish colour and people will think you're an alien)


Once it's properly dry, Berry Ice Cream is really nice to wear. I got two days out of it before the tip wear was noticeable, and it didn't chip until day 3. It did look a little strange against my olive skin tone, since lilac doesn't really suit me (not that I let this stop me - I don't think there's a single colour I wouldn't try), but that's my skin's fault and not the polish! It's a really nice colour and I like how it can't quite seem to decide if it's purple or pink, depending on the light you view it in.

One thing that kept occurring to me whenever I looked at this polish was that it would be really fun to have something this colour, but scented like ice cream. You could have a whole range of shades and scents: mint, berry, vanilla, chocolate... scented nail polish is coming back in at the moment, so maybe I won't have to wait too long before I can enjoy Neapolitan scented nails!

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.