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The Color Theory of Nail Polish Names
A rose by any other name is Grenadine Cascade?
Nail polish names are notoriously funny. If that notoriety hasn’t reached you yet, take a stroll down the drugstore nail polish aisle. You’ll find shiny glass bottles with names like Living Legend, Cosmopolite, and Pure Pearlfection. The names are so strange — and yet somehow so apt — that I wondered: is there a hidden language in these lustrous lacquers? Can the code be cracked — or dare I say, chipped?
After painstaking data collection and research I can now say ‘yes’ to these critical questions. There is a method to the nomenclature, and with a bit of math, bootstrapping, and color theory I was able to build a tool that generates nail polish names to suit a given color. I will explain the madness behind the method, but take a look at the nail polish name generator here to see for yourself the outcome of solving this scintillating puzzle.
Beyond the funny names and satisfying code, though, this investigation was an unexpected introduction to color models — a domain I’d known about, but frankly, assumed was too esoteric to be practical in daily life. For the nail polish question, however, finding the most appropriate color model was half the battle. Thus, this article walks through how I made the generator and illustrates the importance of selecting…
