Lacquer Slacker Liz: NerdLacquer

Showing posts with label NerdLacquer. Show all posts

Sunday, December 15, 2013

NerdLacquer Quasar

Quasar was released by reknowned indie polish maker NerdLacquer as part of the early FROM SPAAAAAACE collection. It is a dark swampy pine green jelly polish packed with holly green, emerald and silver hex glitters, olive and chartreuse microglitters and fine and ultrafine holographic sparkles. The overall effect is of a beautiful Christmas green sparkling mini-mosaic, festive and full of bon vivant (hey, FRENCH!) buoyancy.

Application was dreamy. The consistency is liquid and, though dense with glitters, smoothly applying. An abundance of components accompanies each brushful and disperses fluidly and evenly across the nail. Such formulary skill is one of Amanda's great hallmarks, and it is amazing and delightful to experience. Coverage is excellent. I achieved complete opacity and bottle color in two easy coats. Quasar dries naturally in good time to a slightly textured but still smooth and shiny finish.

Photos show two coats of Quasar over Seche Rebuild treatment and Butter London Nail Foundation basecoat with a topcoat of Seche Vite for added gloss.

NerdLacquer Quasar

NerdLacquer Quasar, macro shot in the bottle

NerdLacquer Quasar

Typically I shy away from a green this close to Kelly green, but Quasar is so charming, so easy to wear and light on the nail that it has won me over. I feel perfectly in tune with the season with it on my nails, an unsual sensation that I welcome with a slight but noticeable burgeoning of my Grinchy heart.

The dark green jelly perfectly showcases all of the fantastically well-apportioned glitter components without overwhelming them. You can see and appreciate them all, and they come together cohesively in a look that is celebratory but not over the top. I can't imagine a better polish for Christmas!

love,
Aunt Liz

Monday, September 23, 2013

NerdLacquer No Medal For Chewie

Nerdlacquer's No Medal For Chewie is the last of the Nerdlacquer polishes gifted to me during a recent polish swap with my wonderful blog friend Thithi of ::pretty::tough::nails::. If you've never visited her blog, get yourself on over there and take a look! She's got eclectic taste in lacquers and swatches 'em on the most beautiful nail beds you'll ever see.

All my NerdLacquers, courtesy of Thithi!

No Medal For Chewie has a deep jungle green jelly base carrying loads of stunning golden green shimmers sprinkled with emerald green and gold hex glitters in various sizes from micro to medium-large. While the larger glitters in my mini bottle were a little hard to come by, I enjoyed the gorgeous olivine shimmers and twinkling microglitters quite a bit. Once again, the formula was excellent. Smooth and fluid with even self-leveling distribution across the nail. To apply a NerdLacquer is to love it, honestly.

Photos show three coats of No Medal For Chewie over Seche Rebuild treatment and Butter London Nail Foundation basecoat plus a topcoat of Seche Vite. Chagrin du jour: there is a Chi hair (they are EVERYWHERE) swiping along the nail and cuticle of my left middle finger in these photos, I didn't see it there when I took the pics I SWEAR!


NerdLacquer No Medal For Chewie

NerdLacquer No Medal For Chewie

That's a pretty gorgeous green, no? I showed it to Fuzzy, another green-loving soul, who said: Yessss, my prrreciousssss... and stroked my nails in a depraved fashion. No, not really. But kinda. If you would like to see much better photos of a much better manicure using this polish, I direct you to Thithi's post about it, here.

Eleanor, I was hoping to get a chance to come up and visit before October but I've been kinda yucky lately so I don't know if I can get my act together enough to make the trip. But I've been thinking about you. On our big red maple the first few leaves are just starting to turn, scant scarlet tatters spread out over the bright green. There are all kinds of leaves down in the pen. I wish I felt more like raking....

What kinds of fall things are you up to lately?

love,
Aunt Liz

Saturday, September 21, 2013

China Glaze Sea Spray and NerdLacquer Outed by a Probot

Fortuna's fibers attacked my manicure en mass today. You know those little two to three millimeter long twisty little filaments that just LOVE to plant themselves in the middle of a polish-wet finger nail or half bury themselves at the free edge of the nail. I swear, it was, like, every other nail there was some kind of fiber-related episode. And when you spot them, there's that moment of what-do-I-do-now panic where all options contain the seeds of debacle. *groan*

Tweezers for the free edge, but of course then you've got to run the risk of doinking a nail fishing them out of the medicine cabinet where of course they're located in the BACK in a CUP with other POINTY POKEY implements. And don't grab the pointed tweezer because unless you're dead on accurate you'll spend what seems like forever trying to grasp the effing little tip of the offending fiber, making your eyes go berserk in the process and risking additional ploinks into your carefully wrapped tip. And let's not forget the coup de grace, where the fiber pulls a syrupy dollop of polish along with it when you finally do manage to pluck it from the nail and immediately gloms onto the tweezer.

As for those iniquitous tiny fibrils that silhouette beneath a fresh coat of polish in the middle of the nail, well dealing with them pretty much depends on how risk averse you are at the time. I've met some such incidents with cautious aplomb and others with fury and I can tell you, fury is high risk. Today, I managed to extract one with the help of my clean up brush, the others I painted over. Yes I did.

The end result is a roundly imperfect manicure that I photographed anyway because I have no shame. Even with the slack clean up and flaky nail surrounds... you know how dogs and cats will sometimes stand up and shake and poof, suddenly there's fur all over the place? Well I think I've developed an ability to do this with my fingers and flakes of skin, only without the shaking. I just get worked up about a manicure that's not going particularly well and poof, suddenly there are dry flakes of skin everywhere.

All this was especially annoying because I was working with one of my favorite polishes from China Glaze, Sea Spray. Sea Spray was released as part of the wonderful Anchors Away collection for Spring 2011 and has since become part of the core line. It is a well-pigmented pale creamy blue grey with subtle silvery blue shimmers, soft, elegant and understated. A beautiful, versatile, timeless color with an equally lovely formula, although my nail ridges give it a run for its money. This is one of the most useful layering polishes I own, it's subtle coloring allows it play well with all kinds of glitters and toppers, but greys, blues and silvers especially.

Photos show two medium coats of Sea Spray over Seche Rebuild and Butter London Nail Foundation. Sea Spray dries naturally to a glossy shine, and I added a topcoat of Seche Vite because after all the fiber-related and other hullabaloo I wasn't taking any chances.

The only other thing to mention is that I was wearing a color-radiating ORANGE top today *slaps forehead* so you will see some not-so-subtle reflection of that color on my fingers and hands in the photos.

China Glaze Sea Spray

Outed by a Probot by NerdLacquer is from the Star Wars series. Amanda, creator of NerdLacquer, describes it as "a shimmering wintery opalescent silver-blue with silver, iridescent, and sky blue glitter." It has a pale somewhat sheer milky blue grey base with medium-large silver hex glitters, medium silver and iridescent ice blue hex glitters and silver and blue iridescent microglitters. It looks to have a bit of silvery shimmer in there too. Dreamy and cloud-like, twinkling frostily with silver, pale blue and pale purple sparks like from the iridescent microglitters, Outed by a Probot over Sea Spray is an ethereal combination.

Though sheer, Outed by a Probot's consistency was liquid and easily applied. My bottle is a mini with a very small, soft flexible brush, which distributed the microglitters evenly across the nail. I had a harder time getting the larger hex glitters onto my nails but managed to fish enough of them out of the tiny bottle to complete a somewhat comprehensive if sparse sampling of the components in Outed by a Probot. I continue to be so impressed with Amanda's formula for her glitter-filled creations: they are fluid and flowing upon application, with no glitter stacking or dragging, no clumping at the neck of the bottle or on the brush, and they dry relatively quickly to a finish that is only slightly textured and very smooth. She is a genius formulator.

I used three thin coats of Outed by a Probot over the Sea Spray manicure above with a topcoat of Seche Vite. All those layers resulted in a rather puffy look at first, especially with the Seche Vite on top, but it dried down nicely and I am happy with the results.

Again, the radioactive looking orange color of my hands and fingers in some of these pics is the reflection of light off of the subdued (NOT!) orange top I wore today.

China Glaze Sea Spray and NerdLacquer Outed by a Probot, bottle shot

NerdLacquer Outed by a Probot over China Glaze Sea Spray on the nail, NerdLacquer Outed by a Probot in the bottle

ditto

LOVE!

NerdLacquer Outed by a Probot over China Glaze Sea Spray

Reminds me of a wintery sky full of clouds heavy with snow, or the perfect garb for a snow fairy. Soft and delicate but not without presence, this combo has a cool sleek feel on the nail that is fabulous.

Sea Spray is such a good color match for Outed by a Probot that I wonder whether I haven't reduced the dimensionality of Outed by a Probot by using them together. I say this because this is the first of the NerdLacquers I've tried that seems to be more interesting to the eye the further it is from the nail.

I must once again thank Thithi for these NerdLacquers I've been swatching, I doubt I would ever have had these wonderful experiences had she not sent them to me. Thithi, you rock!

Don't you love this cool blue look, Eleanor? Does it remind you of happy stay-home-from-school snow days?

love,
Aunt Liz