Essie

The founding story involves ten cartons of nail polish, sixty-four pounds each, carried onto a flight to Las Vegas by a woman who had put her entire savings into them. Six hundred and forty pounds of lacquer, twelve shades, ten thousand dollars, and no distribution whatsoever.

Essie Weingarten had spent the seventies in the New York fashion trade before deciding the interesting opportunity was on people's hands. She had the polish made, named the shades herself in a register that was conversational rather than technical, and went to the place where salon owners gathered. The bet paid off almost immediately: within a year the bottles were in more than ten thousand salons, and the brand spent the following decades doing something the nail industry rarely manages, which is to be a salon staple and a supermarket regular at the same time.

Two things sustained it. The first was shade naming as a form of copywriting, with names that read like inside jokes and gave colours a personality no numbered system could. The second was a sensibility oriented toward sheers, nudes and pale pinks at a moment when the category was chasing saturation, which is how the brand became shorthand for the kind of manicure that photographs well at a wedding. By the time it sold to L'Oreal in 2010 it was turning over around twenty-eight million dollars a year and selling in more than a hundred countries.

The honest read is that this is a colour brand and it is very good at colour. The formulas brush out smoothly and the shade curation is among the most considered in mass retail. The treatment end of the line is where expectations should drop. Base coats and strengtheners across this whole category rest on cosmetic film-forming rather than any demonstrated change to the nail plate, and a nail that keeps splitting is usually a mechanical or medical problem rather than a product-selection one.

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