Lacquer Slacker Liz

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

China Glaze Electric Beat

Electric Beat was released by China Glaze as part of its ElectroPop collection for spring 2012. Most commonly described as a periwinkle blue, Electric Beat is a medium-light milky but vibrant azure blue, a dead ringer for a cloudless blue sky on a going-out-like-a-lamb March day. In my opinion, this leans toward the cornflower side of the cornflower-periwinkle spectrum, but you know what they say about opinions. It's a little cleaner than a Carolina blue, a good match for Jordy blue from the Xona Games color list and reminds me of a color type of the lapis gemstone called denim lapis.

denim lapis tube beads

Application was more work than I expected. I believe that this formula has the potential to be easy to apply, but my bottle had thickened to a point past easy. You know, the kind of thick where it pulls strings when you remove the brush from the bottle. It evens out fairly well once you've got it on, but will pull patches and act like it wants to pool when you're working with it. A bit of polish thinner helped a lot, but I ended up with thicker coats than I was happy with. Pigmentation is very good with complete opacity at two coats. I did three to even out the coverage and cover a couple of areas of balding at the cuticle. Electric Beat dries in very good time to a shade slightly darker than bottle color and a lovely glossy finish.

Photos show three coats of Electric Beat over treatment and basecoat with a topcoat of Seche Vite.

China Glaze Electric Beat

Fuzzy the UNC alum noticed this polish immediately: "What's that blue you're wearing?" It's a little more vibrant in person than my pictures show, and somehow manages to be clear and milky at the same time. It's a very true, unmolested azure blue mixed with white. If I were to pick a Swarovski crystal color to complement this polish, I'd pick light sapphire.

Electric Beat has a very fresh and heady kind of feel on the nail, very atmospheric. The way the air feels in the early morning the day after a big storm, and you walk through the clean washed air like a fish in a stream, feeling it part around you and propel you forward into your day.

love,
Liz

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Essie Mochacino

On the way to CVS today to pick up some languishing prescription refills I contemplated the recently gussied up Essie displays I would be walking past on my way to the pharmacy. There is an aisle header display featuring the recent resort collection and a selection of popular colors plus a nicely stocked wall display that holds what I guess to be core colors. I rarely buy polishes at CVS since I know I can get them for less online, but I told myself that if they had restocked Mochacino in the wall display that I would get it and guess what? One lone bottle. Mine!

Essie's Mochacino is a beautiful sleek medium taupe or beaver brown dusted with a flotilla of iridescent silver shimmers that have a have a soft tremulous pale blue-violet dimensionality to them and throw out tiny blue, pink and pale green sparks in the sun. It's a sophisticated, modern looking color with a chic, dressy quality that reminds me of a pair of well-tailored trousers. I don't have anything else like this fetching all-occasion neutral in my collection and I'm totally smitten with it.

Application was lovely. The consistency is very fluid, almost but not quite to the point where I'd call it runny. I did experience some pooling at the tips of my free edge but chalk that up to user error as I had too much polish on my brush for the second coat. The first coat was a little sheer, and I overcompensated on the next round, is what. No matter, Mochacino is by and large a well-behaved polish that lays down in creamy even coats. This polish dries naturally in fairly good time to a smooth shiny finish.

Photos show two coats of Mochacino over Seche Rebuild treatment and Butter London Nail Foundation basecoat with a topcoat of HK Girl to ensure that heavy second coat dried properly. My apologies for the excess cuticle oil.

Essie Mochacino

Essie Mochacino, with bonus topcoat bubbles!

Essie Mochacino

Such a delicious, eat it with a spoon color! And yet it has a business-like elegance to it as well. I'd love to have a winter wool or trench coat in this color. Not normally something I'd think of as emblematic of spring but it feels perfectly lovely for a fine day in March like today. I can see myself having hefty cravings to wear this polish in the future.

In unfortunate nail news, my right middle finger nail has developed a tear down below the quick. It's holding at about 2mm in length at the moment and seems to be stable as long as I've got polish on but sooner or later I'll have to loose this length I've been enjoying for such a nice long time. I wish I knew how to do a patch properly. Maybe I'll look it up on My Simple Little Pleasures -- Colette is an expert on patches and I love her videos.

xo,
Liz

Monday, March 24, 2014

22k Gold Leaf Manicure

When my friend Edward asked me if I'd like to try gold leafing my nails, I said oh hell yes. Edward is an unusual guy, an artist, artisan, innovator and mentor, a renaissance man with a big heart, an intuitive ear and an adventurous spirit.

He brought over the supplies we'd be using: real gold leaf, brushes, a little dish of clay and glue adhesive mixture made especially for this purpose and a burnisher. Edward is a frame maker and the method he taught me is one that he uses to gold leaf his frames. He had gold leafed a couple of his own nails to show me how it could turn out and showed me the technique on one of my nails, leaving the supplies for me to experiment with.

The photos show my first gold leaf manicure turned out. You'll notice that the only nail with complete coverage is my pinky -- that's the one Edward did! The red that you see peeking out through the breaks in the leaf is the clay and glue mixture. This creates a distressed look that you often see on gold leaf frames. I would have preferred not to have any breaks in the leaf, but I'm still pretty stoked with how it turned out. I'll tell you how I did it after the pics.

22k gold leaf manicure

I started with polish-free, clean dry nails. Using a shallow bowl of hot water double boiler style, I warmed the dish with the clay and glue adhesive mixture to a nice liquid state and with a small artist's brush applied three coats of it to my nails, waiting for it to dry in between coats. Gold leaf is incredibly fragile. I applied it one nail at a time. First I wet the clay mixture generously with an artist's brush dipped in water. Then, ever so carefully, I picked up a piece of gold leaf with a pointed cotton swab tip moistened with water and floated it over the nail. In the best of all possible worlds, it would be sucked down to the surface by static electricity in a smooth even sheet. But gold leaf wrangling is no simple matter and I ended up needing to use several pieces on each nail to get full coverage. Using cotton and the lightest touch possible, I gently pressed the gold leaf onto the nail to seat it.

Then there was a long period of waiting for the gold leaf and the clay mixture to set up properly. This is kind of excruciating, because you can't touch the gold leaf or allow anything else to touch it. Edward said that he likes to give gold leaf three hours to set up on frames. What! I waited as long as I could, about two and a half hours.

The gold leaf now affixed to my nails, I cleaned up the extra pieces adhering to the surrounding skin with my cleanup brush dampened with water. Then using Edward's burnisher, an artisan's tool used to smooth, polish and even out surfaces, I burnished the gold leaf using light pressure in small circular patterns over the nail. This gave it some shine. After that I topped it with a coat of HK Girl topcoat to protect it, and I was done.

Edward said that the clay and glue mixture could be sanded when dry to get a smoother surface, and that's something I'd like to try in the future. Still, my himalayan nail ridges did provide an interesting texture to the look.

love,
Liz

ps The clay and glue mixture isn't waterproof and even though I used a topcoat, this manicure only lasted as long as I didn't immerse my hands in water. Once I'd done that, I started losing it in pieces. But it sure was fun and looked great while it lasted!