Color Anxiety? Don’t Bite Your Nails

By RUTH LA FERLA

Published: September 15, 2010

SEATED near a colleague at Lincoln Center this week, I found myself glancing at her fingertips, which were lacquered in a brooding gray that made my own paler tint seem hopelessly wan. Overcome with the kind of envy only Fashion Week inspires, I ran off in pursuit of that gunmetal shade from Chanel, only to find that it had vanished, supplanted in stores by a range of new pigments — slightly creepy riffs on purple with evocative names like Paradoxal (Chanel), Belle de Nuit (YSL) and Marrow (Butter London).

Enlarge This Image

Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times

How to choose? The question made me anxious since, to my mind at least, picking out just the right shade is what separates the terminally clueless from the cognoscenti.

I have plenty of company, it seems. Not since Vamp, Chanel’s mid-’90s ode to decadence, has nail polish caused such a stir. Chanel’s cadaverous pigments, and other limited-edition hues from Nars, Butter and Strange Beautiful, have spawned a lust for weirdly synthetic greens, rusts, taupes and violets.

There are wait lists for some and mobs clamoring for others, as they did last week, thronging the Chanel boutique in SoHo during Fashion’s Night Out, throwing down $75 for a capsule collection of khakis.

Even Jason Wu gave the trend a nod, collaborating with CND on a mini collection of pearl gray, taupe and maroon shades that will be in stores next spring.

Offbeat as they are, such offerings seem timid compared with the manicures spotted at the latest round of fashion shows, treatments that varied from squared-off nails in high-gloss jade to full-on talons that were pierced, flower-patterned or painted matte beige, a peculiarly bloodless shade, offered in homage, I suppose, to this year’s undying vampire craze.