A year ago I started logging every manicure: the shade, the finish, the light I saw it in, and a one-to-five score for whether my hands looked better with it on. Fifty-two entries later the pattern is embarrassingly clear, and it is not the pattern I would have predicted.
The shades that scored highest were not the ones I had been buying. They were not the ones that looked best in the bottle either, which is the more useful finding, because the bottle is where nearly every nail purchase is decided.
The bottle lies, and it lies predictably
Polish in a glass bottle is being viewed at a depth of about fifteen millimetres. On a nail it is two coats — perhaps forty microns. Every shade is therefore lighter, less saturated and more transparent on the hand than in the bottle, and the shift is not uniform: it is worst for deep jewel tones and negligible for opaque creams.
That single fact accounts for most of the disappointing purchases in my log. Six of the ten lowest-scoring shades were deep colours chosen from the bottle, which arrived on the nail as a thinner, greyer version of themselves and needed a third coat to become what I had bought.
Undertone matters more on nails than on the face
This was the surprise. On the face, a slightly wrong undertone in a blush is diffused across a large soft area and forgives itself. On a nail it sits in a hard-edged block of about a square centimetre, directly adjacent to the skin of the finger — a high-contrast comparison at close range, which is the condition under which the eye is most sensitive to small colour differences.
The consequence: shades that were half a step too yellow made my hands look sallow, and shades half a step too blue made them look cold and slightly red. The same half-step in a lipstick would have gone unnoticed.
The four that always worked
Across a year, four shades scored four or five every time, on every hand I tried them on.
A milky, slightly grey-pink — the one everybody calls a nineties nude and nobody can name a brand for. A true blue-red, dark enough to read as burgundy indoors. A deep olive-brown that has no business being flattering and is. And clear, buffed, with nothing on it, which scored higher than eleven of the shades I paid for.
What they share is not a temperature. It is chroma. All four are relatively desaturated for their depth, which means they sit at a lower contrast against skin and stop competing with it.
What I stopped buying
Anything described as neon, which photographs brilliantly and looks, on a hand at a table, like a mistake made in a hurry.
Anything with visible shimmer at the wear stage. Shimmer looks luxurious in the bottle and it wears badly: as the polish thins at the free edge the flakes concentrate, and by day four there is a glittery tide line no topcoat hides.
And anything I chose in a shop. Every single high scorer was bought after seeing it on someone else’s hand, which is the only viewing condition that matches the one you will be living with.
