Rescue Beauty Lounge Abi

Abi, or Abiquiu as it was originally named, was released by indie polish maker Rescue Beauty Lounge as part of the GOMM (Georgia on My Mind) collection in July 2012. The GOMM collection is a series of polishes inspired by the life and works of modernist American painter Georgia O'Keeffe. Just prior to the release of this collection, the museum that oversees this artist's estate, in a truly myopic act, issued RBL a cease and desist order preventing Ji, the owner and creative force behind Rescue Beauty Lounge, from using O'Keeffe's name or any titles of her works. All of the polishes and the title of the collection had to be renamed. Thus Abiquiu became Abi.

Ji is unusually interdisciplinary in her approach to artisinal polish making. She often puts together creative menages of music and text to accompany polishes, pulling together art in a variety of forms to serve as a richly woven guide to her personal creative process. Here is the text that accompanies Abi on the RBL website:

Clusters of brushed desert plants sway mesmerically with the wind. After a thunderous rain that cleanses off dust and sunburns, Abi captures the moment when that first sunbeam appears and flashes them with a warm kiss.

Abi has a medium-toned leafy chartreuse base bearing ultrafine microshimmers in silver, pink and pale blue, which produce a delicate opalescent sheen in indirect light. This is an amazing yellow-green polish that manages to be both soft and bright simultaneously. It's something of a chameleon also, reading as a silvery olive in dim light and shade and as a bright apple green in direct sun. Dusky olive underpins fresher hues of fern and jade, and rich pea green offers a grounding boost to the spry, springy soul of the polish. The result is a color that is singular and generous, sophisticated and simple, a beautiful creamy interpretation of yellow-green with a subtle pearliness that provides dimensionality and a lovely soft focus effect on the nail.

Application was dreamy. The consistency of Abi is fluid, light and thin but not the least bit runny, with a creamy, dense quality and a silky glide over the nail. Rarely have I come across a polish that was as easy to manipulate as this one, or one that applied as cleanly in such thin coats. Rescue Beauty Lounge polishes are equipped with a very slender round flexible brush, more slender even than Essie's brush, and it really facilitates getting close to the cuticle and into the corners of the nail bed. Pigmentation is very good with completely even opaque coverage available in two coats. Because my nail ridges stubbornly refused to disappear, I applied an additional, thicker coat for a total of three. Cleanup is easy and straightforward. Abi dries naturally in good time to a rich glossy finish.

Photos show three coats of Abi over treatment and basecoat with a topcoat of Seche Vite. Apologies for the scruffiness of my fingers and nail surrounds, decorated as they are with bits of thread (from where I do not know) and an eyelash (how did I not notice it?). 

Rescue Beauty Lounge Abi

Rescue Beauty Lounge Abi

Rescue Beauty Lounge Abi

Rescue Beauty Lounge Abi

Rescue Beauty Lounge Abi

Rescue Beauty Lounge Abi

Rescue Beauty Lounge Abi

Rescue Beauty Lounge Abi

Rescue Beauty Lounge Abi

Rescue Beauty Lounge Abi

Rescue Beauty Lounge Abi

Rescue Beauty Lounge Abi

Abi is like what would happen if China Glaze Def Defying, American Apparel Army Jacket and Essie Navigate Her all got together, had a baby and infused it with ultrafine pearly microshimmers. 

Abiquiu (pronounced AH-beh-cue, or thereabouts), the namesake of this polish, is a small town in north central New Mexico, around 60 miles north of Santa Fe, where Georgia O'Keeffe made her home from 1949 until shortly before her death at age 98 in 1986. 

The Chama River runs through Abiquiu and the Chama River Canyon Wilderness nearby. Vegetation varies from Pinon and juniper to ponderosa and fir with lots of Gambel oak, chamisa and cactus. I'd like to imagine that greens such as in this photo were among those that informed Ji's creation of Abi.... (source)

An interesting note about the word chartreuse: Chartreuse liqueur was first produced in monasteries by monks of the Carthusian order in 1764. These monasteries were known as "charter houses" as they had been originally chartered/materially supported by local nobility. Chartreuse is French for "charter house."

Green Chartreuse liqueur (source)

I've never tasted Chartreuse. I imagine it to be something like Jägermeister, which I consider to be a Dangerous Substance. My ex once invented a cocktail he called the Vulcan Mind Meld with Jäger and green creme de menthe. You can only imagine!

love,
Liz