inglot

Excuse the ragged and nibbled cuticles, I'm due a proper manicure any day now! As my nails are rather short at the moment (I lopped them off before going on holiday), I decided to go dark. Zoya Freja is a deep gunmetal grey-silver, which is a nice compromise if you don't like to go full-on black on the nails. It goes on beautifully opaque in two coats and dries to a shimmery metallic finish.

I topped that off with some of my Inglot XL6 polish, which didn't work so well on it's own, but looks rather pretty on top of the Zoya base colour.

My second Inglot nail polish purchase was this beautiful creamy pink. It has a sort of beigey-neutral undertone, and in certain lights, looks more mocha than pink on the nail.

Application on this one was OK - the polish is fairly thin and spreadable, but with a teeny tiny brush which requires you to make a number of strokes to get the whole nail evenly covered. This, coupled with the relatively fast drying nature of the polish, means you have to apply a fairly thick layer in order to get decent coverage before it starts drying. I managed to achieve bottle colour in two of these thick coats.

Unfortunately, the wear on this was terrible. Paired with the same top coat and base coat I always use, the first chips set in after just one day, and the picture to the right shows the state of my right hand after two days.

Overall, despite the lovely colour and good drying speed, I'm very unimpressed with this polish, and doubt I'll be trying any more from Inglot's vast range of colours.

If you'd like to try it yourself, you can purchase from the Inglot store at Westfield - as I didn't get a proper breakdown receipt, I can only tell you that 2 polishes and an eyeshadow cost me £22.

On Saturday, I happened to be at Westfield, London's newest shopping centre. It's a bit of a destination for beauty lovers; as well as the multitude of counters available at Boots, Debenhams and House of Fraser, there's a freestanding MAC store, and also an Inglot store. While I managed to avoid the counters and the MAC store, I'd never tried any Inglot stuff before, and that made it hard to resist!

Inglot is a Polish brand and I'd probably describe them as being much like MAC, in that they stock a wide range of shades in both face and colour cosmetics, but at a slightly less expensive price point. One of the things I picked up was a nail enamel in XL6 - a milky clear colour with lots and lots of blue/green/yellow glitter. I had trouble choosing even two shades from the range of polish - literally, there must have been hundreds of colours laid out, including some oh-so-fashionable matte shades.

The polish, once applied to my nails, had a disappointingly sparse glitter effect. In the photo to the right here, I've layered 4 coats to get a more sparkly effect (so difficult to photograph!), but unfortunately that seems to have left my nails with a slight yellow tinge under the glitter. I was also surprised that what seems to be a topcoat dried down with very little shine.

This shade, I think, will be nice layered on top of other colours, but it won't give me the solid-glitter, ultra-sparkly look I was hoping for. Still, the texture of the polish was smooth and easy to apply and the sparkle pretty, so this is a bit of a mixed result.

Unfortunately Inglot gave me only a combined receipt, and they don't have a UK website yet, so I can only advise you that two nail enamels and an eyeshadow cost me £22 at Inglot Westfield.

Here's an EOTD with my newest "adventurous" makeup purchase - Eyeliner Gel from Inglot in shade 79 - aka bright, pillarbox red.

I fell in love with this pretty much on sight. I didn't know if I'd be able to wear it but it didn't matter - the idea of a red gel liner had me sold straight away.

As it turns out, this stuff is great. It has a smooth, creamy formula and is no fuss to apply. It also dries down to an unbudgeable finish. The box describes it as "matte" but I actually found that it had a slightly shiny finish once dry.

I've DIY'd red liner in the past using red eyeshadow and various mixing media, but I feel that the itch is now well and truly scratched with this product.

One small complaint - the product seems to have dried out and cracked a bit in storage, as the picture above shows. I understand that these probably don't sell very often so the stock won't move very quickly. But Inglot, how about designing some decent air-tight packaging for your gel products?

Price was £8, bought from the Inglot store, Westfield, London. I don't have details of an online stockist for this brand, but I'll update this information if I discover any.

More pics below the cut.