Rimmel were probably the first nail polish brand I was aware of. Back in the 70's they marketed themselves through double page ads in women's weeklies like Woman and Woman's Own. Spread across two pages they would showcase each shade and variant of a particular product, foundation & blusher, eye products and nail polish. The nail polish ad consisted of a grid of close to 100 close-ups of stylised nails each painted with a different Rimmel shade, like some kind of periodic table of nail polish!
I haven't been able to find the exact ad I remember but this one is close...
My sister and I would pore over the ads, each choosing our favourites in turn - if only we'd had the money as pre-teens to buy any of them!
In the early 80's I finally had money (courtesy of a job delivering local free papers) and would excitedly head to Woolworths in Canterbury to peruse the selection in person.
Of course back then they were mostly shades of red, pink and pinky nude with the odd purple, blue or green shade to add excitement. And I was more interested in the pearls and frosts than boring cremes, how times change!
Fast forward to the 90's and Rimmel is no longer one of a small number of players with the market sewn up, all kinds of new drugstore brands have come along, and everyone has to up their game. So, perhaps influenced by the extreme colours and formulations of people like Urban Decay, Hard Candy and Rimmel's drugstore rivals Revlon and their Streetwear range, Rimmel put out all sorts of amazing colours under their 60 seconds and Lasting Colour ranges.
Here is one of the standout shades from that time, Zeitgeist, a fantastic name for an amazing polish.
Zeitgeist is a strong plum/green duochrome. The plum is warm, pinkish and somewhat muted, the green is yellow toned, almost olive.
In artificial light it's plum with a hint of green but in sunlight it really comes alive. The duochrome flip is so strong you can get both colours showing on even moderate length nails.
Swatches shown are 2 coats.
Sadly, as you can see, I have a duff bottle and all of the white overlay printing has come loose and moved around and I've had to put sticky tape over the bottle to try and preserve what's left. After I'd taken these pictures I found another bottle of Zeitgeist in my stash, label still intact.
Application on this one was a bit odd but that may have been down to the many drops of thinner I'd had to add. From my limited research it seems a number of the 8xx series Rimmels were standout shades, including Climax, Zenith, Mania (coming up) and Fanatic. And what awesome names.
