Lens review: ICK Premiere Wine

Hello pretties!

Continuing the circle lens reviews and today it's time for the ICK Premiere Wine! This is a dark red and I originally bought it because it was a red lens that appeared to be quite different from the rest.

Let's go!

Base curve: 8.6 mm

Diameter: 15.0 mm

Water content: 42%

Life span: 1 year (I recommend 6 months)

These have a sorta natural pattern for being a red lens but the pupil hole is really big. This means that the color is mainly gonna be at the edges once worn and that a lot of your natural eye color will be fully visible at the center. This effect generally looks more natural on dark eyes as opposed to light eyes like me, mainly because brown is closer to black and well, if you have really dark eyes then it will simply look more believable as the colors won't clash and instead you get a more realistic transition between eye and lens. It's hard to explain but it's very obvious when you see the difference and, as a light eyed reviewer, these lenses (along with all lenses with a huge center opening) will look a certain way on me and some like it and others are bothered by it. I'm rather neutral.

One lens in.

This is a fairly big lens and I think it looks pretty okay. The color turns out to be this kind of dark brownish red, almost a bit rusty in tone depending on the light conditions. On my eyes it doesn't look very natural for aforementioned reasons but I can't say that I would dislike it simply because of that. I don't know why but for some reason I think of monsters and zombies when I look at these, not because they look inherently creepy but because there is something with having such a concentrated color only at the edges and yeah, it is red after all.

Lens photos below!
All photos taken by yours truly during a September noon with a semi-cloudy sky. There's no color filters or such on the close-up photos and that's so that the colors would be as true to real life as possible.

Natural room light indoors.

Yellow room light indoors.

Unlit corridor, poor natural light in the distance.

Flash photo.

Facing a window, not sun side.

Outdoors, back against the sun. (facing wall)

Outdoors, facing the sun.

Outdoors, backyard. (shadow side)

In some lights these lenses look almost more brown than red! I don't personally feel like they are all that wine colored but I can see why they're named that.

Based on my first impressions wearing these lenses (they had expired so I took the photos and then immediately discarded them) they didn't seem very comfortable. Always remember that I have very very dry eyes naturally and so my comfort might differ a lot from your comfort because surprise, everyone's eyes are different! But yeah, for me these lenses were thin but still I could always feel that I had lenses on and on top of that they were scratchy. It could be because they had expired but as I only wore them once I can't tell. Regardless I estimate wearing time to be 2-3 hours for me, which is poor to average.

I can't really recommend these lenses for cosplay because the color doesn't cover much of your actual iris, unless of course you're dark eyed then maybe. They are not natural enough for daily looks either so I would say that these are mainly a fashion lens and first to mind comes darker styles like goths and such. It's not a bad lens but it's not one of my favorites and I would most likely not repurchase these, but at least I have now done the review so I can stop being curious about these and write them off my to-try list. xD

Distance photo!

Short summary:

Color: 6/10
Very dark, brownish red. Kinda rusty in color more than wine, in my opinion.

Design: 6/10

A rather simple design on which all color is packed on the outer edges of the lens.

Opacity: 7/10

The actually colored parts are super dense and covering but the huge pupil hole lowers the grade.

Enlargement: 7/10

Bigger than average for sure. Maybe it's the design but these don't feel that huge.

Comfort: 3/10

Thin but I constantly feel them ("plastic in the eye" feeling) and they were scratchy. Estimated 2-3 hours of wear on dry, sensitive eyes.

Naturalness: 2/10

Too big and too dark (too much contrast) to look passable on my eyes. Likely better outcome on brown eyes.

Thank for reading my blog, more reviews are coming soon!

Shiro Samurai out.