The Results Of A Very Official And Highly Scientific Survey About Nail Polish

ABSTRACT
Hello and welcome! As many of you know, we are avid and enthusiastic supporters of science, as well as amateur nail polish connoisseurs. With that in mind, we present our First Ever Very Official And Highly Scientific Survey. About nail polish.

Our goal was simple: we wanted to see what, if any, connection there was between our favorite nail polish colors and our favorite nail polish color names. This is an important distinction. The best names are not necessarily tied to the best colors; nail polish names are inventive, distinctive, and often truly bizarre, while colors tend to favor fairly standard palettes. Pinks, reds, and taupes are plentiful, with only the occasional ~wacky~ digression.

For the purposes of this essay, we restricted ourselves to traditional nail polishes (no gels or nail art) for manicures, either personally or professionally applied. We sent the form out to a buttload of people, I don’t remember how many because I am a blogger, not a real scientist. Thirty-three responded. The results were…fun!!

EQUIPMENT AND METHODOLOGY
Our equipment was a new and burgeoning software called “Google Drive.” Have you heard of it? I think it’s going to be big!! Anyway, we created a simple form with three questions:

Responses were collected over a period of one week (seven days) and deposited anonymously into a automatically-generated spreadsheet.

RESULTS

Ok, so despite our VERY STRICT RULES about one color per response, lots of people were Bad and snuck in multiples. So that accounts for the somewhat confusing math in these results.

Also, some people have different labels for their favorite colors, but for the most part I tried to jam them all under the corresponding umbrella color: if someone said “turquoise” or “navy” I marked that as a “blue.”

With that in mind! The clear frontrunner for favorite color is RED. Red leads by wide margin. Second is BLUE. PINK and GREEN tie for third. GREY, TAUPE, and WHITE follow. The sad losers are PURPLE and ORANGE 🙁

Some of the existing favorite names are…hilarious. Here are a few that particularly stood out:

I’m Not Really a Waitress
Starter Wife
Mermaid’s Dream
Sparkling Garbage
I Love Applause
Head Mistress
Encrusted Treasures
Vermillionaire
Can’t Find My Czechbook
Party Bruise
Van d’go
Girl Without Limits
Red My Mind
Fear or Desire
New Money
Midnight in Moscow

WHO are the poets working for these nail polish companies, that’s what I want to know.

In terms of suggested names and colors, there were some truly excellent ideas. There was also a clear pattern that emerged early on; can you spot it?

Versace on Ice: cool shade of green
Google Deep Dream: an algorithmically-determined, holographic-inclined baby blue-tinged shade that’ll periodically shift into varying spirit molecular trips
Eat Dicks: period blood red
Green Eggs and Ham: like the weirdest green. Like a mix of a Tanqueray bottle and poison ivy.
FLAWLESS***: the color is irrelevant; but it blinds anyone who questions my excellence
Beets Poo: dark purple
Chillantro: a vibrant, frothy green
Blood Before It Dries: same
Trophy Husband: Iridescent black.
Man Stabber: blood red
Cutthroat: red
Jane Ostentatious: hot pink
Second Date: turquiose
Hand Job: pearlescent
Bitch Better Have My Money: a perfect blood red

BLOOD and RED is the recurring theme I noticed. SEX and VIOLENT DEATH also come up frequently. Proud of you, Hairpin friends; your commitment to this horny and dangerous brand is strong.

CONCLUSIONS
Uh…nail polish is cool!! That seems like a safe conclusion. Is there a connection between the colors we wear and their names? Not really. Is there a connection between the names we’d like to see and colors we’d like to wear? Kind of!!

What else? Did we miss any color or name that should’ve been represented? What’s on your nails…RIGHT NOW?! Tell us in the comments!