Lacquer Slacker Liz: Hare Polish Medusa Luminosa over Impala Azul Aviador

Hare Polish Medusa Luminosa is another polish from Hare's The Illuminated Life collection. You'll remember the first polish I showed you from that collection, Electric Flame. Well Medusa Luminosa was inspired by another bioluminescent sea creature, the pelagio noctiluca jellyfish, aka (also known as) medusa luminosa.

pelagio noctiluca or medusa luminosa jellyfish (source)

Pretty cool, eh?

Hare Medusa Luminosa is a "bright purple jelly with gold glass flecks, pink microglitter and glowing blue hexes." It's a complex mysterious polish that creates little glowing universes on the nails. Once you start looking at it, you cannot get enough!

Being a jelly and therefore translucent, I knew I'd better find some appropriate underwear to layer it over. This turned out to be more difficult than I thought it would be. I have a few purple cremes in my collection but Medusa Luminosa is very much a blue-leaning purple, a violet really, and the purples I have all had too much red in them. Using a swatch wheel, I tried two of them with Medusa Luminosa and they really changed the look of the base color as I suspected they would.

So I went to the bottom shelf of my polish rack where I keep my "tiny thin" polishes, to my small collection of Impalas (from sexy Brazil, baby!). There I did find a purple jelly, not an exact match to the base color of Medusa Luminosa but closer than the purple cremes. And it was a jelly. This is important, because I'm finding that the glitter jelly polishes I try do best over other jellies. Something about having the translucence of another jelly underneath them really allows them to do what they are meant to do, showcase their glitters.

The Impala I found to serve as a base color for Medusa Luminosa is called Azul Aviador -- blue flyer, I think that means. It's from their Army collection, so maybe it's actually blue pilot. In any case, it's a blue-leaning purple jelly.

I got my basecoat on and gingerly applied two coats of Azul Aviador. Gosh, I am so NOT brave. Applying Impalas, with their slender tapered flame shaped bottles and their large (relatively) round whiskery brushes totally unnerves me.


see how big that brush is compared to the bottle?

Too much potential for this, only worse because it's with polish instead of remover:

Plus Impala's jellies have this kind of thick and sticky consistency that just sends up all kinds of red mess-making potential flags in my head. And sure enough, I somehow I have no clue how managed to get a blob of Azul Aviador on the pad of the middle finger on my right hand. I was applying it to my left hand, steadying my right with the middle, ring, and pinkie fingers resting on the WHITE paint of the bathtub surround. ACK! Luckily it cleaned up with a bit of acetone on my clean up brush and didn't remove TOO much of the white paint. *guilty slink*

One of these days I'm just going to spend all the time I need to swatch all of my Impalas. Hopefully by the end of that I'll be over this self-fulfilling prophesy.

Back to the Hare! I applied one coat of Medusa Luminosa over my hard-earned Azul Aviador base. Just one coat, topped with Seche Vite.