How It's Made: Nail Polish

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

This article was originally published on HelloGiggles.com

We're so obsessed with nail polish, yet we've never considered how it's actually made. Our beauty mentors over at Refinery29 have inspired a major a-ha moment. With a video on the process of nail polish making, we're not only informed, but even more obsessed.

Did you know that modern nail polish was inspired by brightly-colored automobile paint ?!

The basic components of nail polish include resins and plasticizers, solvents, and coloring agents. The exact formulation of a nail polish depends primarily upon choices made by chemists.

Using a variety of pigments that, in powder form, look like pure magic, the chemist mixes the hue by adding a suspension base to distribute the pigments.

As evidenced in the video, it's fascinating to observe the colors swirl into liquid form, like watching a taffy pull.

We're mesmerized

Next, an adhesive polymer is mixed in. That's what makes the polish actually stick.

Orly makes over five tons of polish every day

FIVE TONS. That's 10,000 pounds. Or 160,000 ounces, or approximately 640,0000 bottles of polish, if we're doing the math right.

Drums of polish get hooked up to filling machines in what looks like the prettiest factory in the universe

Then, the polish is pumped into the bottles, which are pre-loaded with mixing balls.

The conveyer-belt process looks like something out of Willy Wonka's Beauty Factory.

Next, enter the brushes

Each brush has 600 bristles. (!!!)

Finally, the bottles get labeled with their cutesy names like "Skinny Dip," and then sealed.

An unopened bottle of nail polish can remain fresh forever. Though that's cool, that's not the point. Nope, the point is how it'll look on our own digits.

BRB, headed to the nail polish shop.