Nail Polish With the Look of Molten Metal
It started on the toes. You can get away with anything on your toes. And then boys started wearing it, first on a thumb, then all 10 fingers. Call it the new heavy metal. Here in Southern California, where every third storefront is Ye Olde Nail Hut, we’ve long eschewed nail polish moderation, so a few dark metallics were no big deal. After all, local cosmetics creators had already blazed lurid fashion trails: Ripe of Los Angeles, in sparkly gumdrop hues; Urban Decay of Costa Mesa, in industrial grays. But now it’s fall, and nails are suddenly metallic with a vengeance, glinting this way, then that, depending on the light. Burnished purples, steely blues and oxidized greens--all eerily familiar to anyone who’s searched for his violet M3 or her lime green Del Sol in parking lots awash in slick, shiny color.
But these are not shades just for the hip and cool. Ripe, Urban Decay, Hard Candy--they offer the colors for the young and rebellious, the polish you put on to Make A Statement. When mainstream brands such as Christian Dior, Lancome and Chanel depart from their beloved Misty Morning Pinks and Jungle Reds, you know some devilry is afoot. Of course, the names are tamer--Dior’s Steel Grey, Lancome’s Neptune and Chanel’s Metallic Vamp can’t compare with Urban Decay’s Stray Dog and Alley Cat or even M.A.C.’s Rebel and Fluid--but the colors are dark, androgynous, wild. These are not your mother’s nail polishes no matter who’s putting them out.
“Makeup is back,” says Dan Moriarty at Christian Dior. “And more important, makeup experimentation is back. Yes, the dark metallics are a young look, but it’s not like wearing a bare midriff. Some things look just as good on a 50-year-old as on a 15-year-old.” According to Moriarty and other folks in the mixing rooms, the colors actually owe more to the runways than the freeways. Stray Dog and Alley Cat were created to complement Todd Oldham’s fall collection, and Dior and Chanel claim they’re simply reflecting the glittering palettes of their collections this season.
And the androgyny angle? Well, masculine digit painting seems to be a West Coast trend. But if guys with the finish fetish were real men, they’d wear Coral Geranium. Nonmetallic.
