Aliquid Lacquer: Egeria

Aliquid Lacquer has a really awesome collection of polishes inspired by ancient Roman mythology and tradition called When In Rome.  She releases one new lacquer every month, and each month's lacquer generally has something to do with that month.  For example, July's polish Neptunalia (which I think I really really need) is inspired by the Roman's midsummer tradition of honoring Neptune, which took place on July 23.

Here's the description of Egeria from Aliquid Lacquer's website:

Egeria was a water nymph and patroness of childbirth, wisdom and prophecy. She befriended Rome’s second king, Numa, and advised him on how to set up the religious and legal practices of Rome. When Numa died, Egeria was transformed into a spring, which people would visit to ask for her inspiration.

So that explains why the polish Egeria looks exactly like a beautiful, sparkly pond.  I absolutely love the holographic glitter in this.  And the non-holo pink glitters break up the holo sparkle just enough to prevent you from getting totally lost in the sparkly reflections - just like a lily would do in a real pond!  Egeria actually reminds me a little bit of Monet's Gardens by Emily de Molly - an Australian indie polish that I've been coveting for over a year but always seem to miss out on through EdM's stockists that ship to America.  Owning this polish satisfies my needs of having a pond on my nails. <3

woohoo, holographic glitters!

As far as application goes, Egeria is quite nice.  I had to dab a little bit in order to get an even distribution of glitter across my nails, but the jelly base is thin enough that I didn't end up with any awful globs of polish anywhere.  (Well except for on the inner corner of my pointer finger, but that's because I accidentally got too many glitters stuck there.)  I did end up with a small thin spot near the cuticle on my middle finger, which I didn't notice until I was taking the photos - so be aware of that if you use this polish.  Just make sure that you cover all parts of your nail on every coat and you'll be fine!

so dense with glitter!!!

  
Two coats of Egeria is pretty much opaque, but there was a tiny bit of VNL, so I built up to 3 coats on my pointer and pinkie fingers.  My middle and ring fingers just have 2 coats.  What's really great about the thinness of the jelly base is that 3 coats doesn't look ridiculously thick on my nails.  Sometimes, when I use 3-4 coats of a glitterbomb for opacity or glitter depth, my nails end up looking kind of spherical, but that definitely didn't happen here.

 

I had to take the photos for this polish on my phone, because my Canon camera absolutely did not want to pick up the color.  The pink glitters showed up all right, but the teal base might as well have been gray for all my camera cared!  Yuck!  I really prefer the photo quality of my camera, but sometimes, sacrificing pixel count and focal length is necessary to show color accuracy.

I've never known much about Roman mythology, except for my highly biased opinion that they stole their ideas from the Greeks.  But the When in Rome collection is educating me on Roman mythology one month at a time, and teaching me that they had a lot of very unique gods, goddesses, spirits, and traditions!

What do you think of this polish?  Who's your favorite Roman mythology character?  Which When in Rome polish is your favorite?  Let me know in the comments!