The New Polish Trend Is Like Jelly Shoes for Your Nails

Liquid, Magenta, Red, Pink, Purple, Violet, Maroon, Drinkware, Material property, Glass bottle,

(Image credit: Courtesy of Yves Saint Laurent Beauté, design by Mike Stillwell)

published 4 June 2015

Crucial update: Kind of like a zombie who claws her way out of a body bag to fight crime and sexist portrayals of women in cinema, nail art is mostly dead, but just *slightly* less dead than before.

Take the negative space manicure, for example. Or the single-sticker/rhinestone-placed-near-the-tip thing Emily Weiss Instagrams all the time. Both are nice, but sometimes you just want a simple color finish, but like, not a traditional one, you know? Enter jelly nail polish.

With one coat of Yves Saint Laurent's just-launched La Laque, for example, you get a translucent watercolor effect; with two, a juicy, squishy look reminiscent of binder covers and probably toxic party favors. You can sandwich a glitter polish between layers of Sally Hansen's Palm Beach Jellies (if you can still find them) for float-ier pailettes than any available on the market. But the real draw—beyond the quickness, the customizability, and the fabulously suspended sparkles—has to be how it toes the line between bare and dressed-up: If the regular opaque, one-color paint job is a crew-neck T-shirt, then the jelly nail is a slinky, sheer slip dress.

Exposed lunulas are totally hot, right? Shop some of our favorites below.

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Chelsea Peng is a writer and editor who was formerly the assistant editor at MarieClaire.com. She's also worked for The Strategist and Refinery29, and is a graduate of Northwestern University. On her tombstone, she would like a GIF of herself that's better than the one that already exists on the Internet and a free fro-yo machine. Besides frozen dairy products, she's into pirates, carbs, Balzac, and snacking so hard she has to go lie down.