Care for nails while wearing nail polish!

Moisture is important to the nails just as it is essential to the skin. Nails may chip, crack, or peel at the tips – a contributing factor is the fragility of the nails due to a shortage of moisture. While the nail is soft and easy to clip after a bath, cracking may occur when the nail is clipped when it is cold and dry. This is related to the moisture in the nails. Nails readily absorb moisture; however, they also allow evaporation of that moisture.

This award-winning technology investigated the nails of 75 women, studied the individual relationships between the nails and moisture, and then developed a new technology of introducing water into the nail enamel. This resulted in nail enamel that was gentle to the nails and not only suppressed the evaporation of moisture but also provided moisture.

Normally, nail enamels consist of an oil component, solvent component, coating material for the forming membrane, and a colorant. When the enamel is applied on the nail, the solvent vaporizes and the coating material solidifies and dries. The new technology involves the formulation of water in the oil, which is the main component of nail enamels. Water and oil usually do not mix; therefore, emulsifying technology is used, where one component is split into microparticles and dispersed evenly into the other component. There are two broad types of emulsifying technology for skincare cosmetics, and in this case, w/o type emulsion in which microparticles of water are dispersed in oil was used.

Many of the components used in cosmetics are water-soluble, therefore it is considered very difficult to develop w/o type emulsion technology. In addition, this research deals with nail enamels rather than skin care products, therefore colorant must be considered as well. Nail enamel adds color to the nails for brilliance and beauty. For this reason, the basic requirements of nail enamel are not fulfilled if the color fades or changes, if the luster is lost, or if drying time is prolonged. Also, the nature of the oil has a major impact on the emulsion process that involves uniform dispersion of water into the oil. The oil used in nail enamel (solvents) is very different from oils generally used in cosmetic products, and this caused difficulty in realizing the emulsion type nail enamel.

These difficulties were resolved through trial and error to develop a technology for a completely new nail enamel including water. Following this, we asked 30 women to actually apply this new nail enamel for a series of studies. The result of these studies confirmed that compared to traditional products the new nail enamel didn’t make your nails feel tight or heavy when applied as it suppressed water evaporation from the nail and replenished the nail with moisture instead. This technology was later applied to clé de peau BEAUTÉ Treatment Enamel.