Darling Diva Polish Grumpy Bear - swatch and review

Darling Diva Polish Grumpy Bear

Darling Diva Polish Grumpy Bear is one of Darling Diva's 'Care Bears' collection and as the name suggests is based on Grumpy Bear - that's the blue one with the white cloud with red hearts and raindrops on his belly, hence the heart and cloud shaped glitters in this polish.

The polish is a sheer, almost jelly-like periwinkle duochrome packed with pretty pastel glitters - white hexes in two sizes, pink and purple hearts and pale blue flower/cloud shapes.

Darling Diva Polish Grumpy Bear

I used four thin coats of Grumpy Bear to build up a good density of colour and complexity of glitter. This also covered any visible nail line; I guess on short nails you could use three coats and still get a similar effect. The duochrome colour shift is from teal through periwinkle to lavender and is really pretty - much more complex than the polish looks in the bottle. The formula itself is good, the polish is fluid and the brush picks up the glitters easily without any need for fishing. The duochrome base builds to a pretty, glowing colour without any streaking or frostiness. I didn't attempt to do any 'placement' of the bigger glitters as I didn't want to stir up the duochrome base on my nails and make the polish streaky and lumpy, but I'm very happy with how the arrangement of glitters ended up. I smoothed the whole lot out with a coat of Gelous and a thick coat of Seche Vite; the only areas of unevenness where I really needed this were around the heart and flower glitters; my nails have a strong c-curve and I usually find it difficult to get large, flat glitter shapes to lie nicely on my nails. If you have flatter nails this shouldn't be a problem.

In bright sunlight, the overall effect of Grumpy Bear is light and silvery, with a pretty lavender to silver-blue colour shift. In this light the pink hearts stand out well against the background colour:

Darling Diva Polish Grumpy Bear

In indirect light, Grumpy Bear flashes a much stronger teal to lilac, and you can see the lovely transparent quality of polish too

Darling Diva Polish Grumpy Bear

Here's a macro shot showing the teal shimmer and how nice and smooth the duochrome pigments are on the nail.

Darling Diva Polish Grumpy Bear

Although I prefer Grumpy Bear without undies, it can be worn layered over a darker polish to emphasise the duochrome a bit more if you prefer. I think you need to take a bit of care when layering duochromes over dark colours, otherwise the end result can end up streaky, especially if you use multiple coats of the duochrome. I've used just one coat of Grumpy Bear over Revlon Carbonite here - I chose Carbonite rather than black as the lighter colour and broken, slightly glittery finish is a lot more forgiving than a stark black.

Darling Diva Polish Grumpy Bear over Revlon Carbonite

Darling Diva Grumpy Bear was sent to me as a sample for review. I've also reviewed Darling Diva Dirty Deeds and Serendipity. These polishes are all quite different to each other and all rather lovely! You can buy Darling Diva polishes from Darling Diva's Etsy Shop, Llarowe and Mei Mei's Signatures; all these sellers ship internationally. Norway Nails also stocks Darling Diva and ships within Europe.