Apex Blue Pearl might be the best colour Acura makes, and on this Integra Type S it's finally got a finish that's worth it. Icon Rocklear, our permanent paint protection coating, becomes part of your paint and pulls the metallic out of the blue, so the honeycomb lights don't land on the hood as flat white patches, they land like ripples on water. You're seeing the same depth from behind in the rear three quarters, with the reflection carrying across the quarter panel and down over the triple centre exit exhaust.

Pearls gain the most here and they're the ones that lose the most without it. A pearl's working by layering a tinted coat over a base so the colour shifts as you move around the car, and all of that effect's living in the top few microns, which is exactly what sun exposure goes after first. A coated finish resists the UV fade that turns a vivid pearl into the flat, slightly grey version of itself you've seen on cars left outside a few summers too long.

The Type S body helps too, because there's a lot of it in one piece. The fenders are flared wider than you'd get on a standard Integra, the roofline runs long into a liftback tail, and the front's mostly one broad sheet of metal with a single hard crease. Those wide uninterrupted panels are where you can actually tell whether a finish is even, which is why several frames here are low angle door and side profile shots rather than the usual walkaround.

Twenty photos from the shop: front three quarters low, wide and raised, a straight on front, the full side profile, rear three quarters at two heights, and close work on the headlight and hood, the wheels and calipers, the mirror, and the door panels. If you've got a pearl or a metallic, this is the page to read.