Deborah Lippmann’s 15-Year History With Nails

Photo: Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin

In recent years, perhaps no other beauty category has had quite the makeover as nails. Where once there were only ballet pinks and classic reds, the nail category has undergone a complete reinvention (crackle! glitter! art!). You could say almost anything goes these days, but nail guru Deborah Lippmann might beg to differ. Trends are reining in for the upcoming seasons, she says, and she should know: the celebrity manicurist (she’s tended the famous digits of Cher, Reese Witherspoon, Lady Gaga, Kate Winslet and more) has her own line, which is celebrating 15 years this fall.  Here, Lippmann walks us down memory lane.

1999
The Deborah Lippmann brand launches at Henri Bendel and Fred Segal. Colors were “classic and sophisticated,” Lippmann remembers. “Lots of red and pale pinks.”

2002
At the time, sheer pinks and sheer beiges were king. “But I started to see some weird fashion nudes,” she says.  “I tried to introduce a couple of opaque beiges that I used on fashion shoots. We did one called The Way We Were with a yellow undertone, and a pinky-beige called As Time Goes By. They were everywhere in fashion, but I couldn’t get them to sell to save my life.”

2006
The squoval (square-oval) was the nail shape of the decade. “The fallacy that a lot of women believed was that square nails make your nails stronger,” she says. “It’s just not the case—it’s how you file the nail—but it reigned for a long time.”

Lippmann tried to make two jelly shades happen: Rehab, a translucent navy blue, and I Want Candy, a see-thru red, are eventually discontinued.

Deborah Lippmann’s original glitter nail polish, Happy Birthday.

2009
Glitter mania! “My mindset has always been based in fashion, but at a certain point, we took nail polish too seriously,” she says. “Also the recession started to hit. Maybe we needed to lighten up a little bit.” Lippman also observed that women were doing their nails more at home to save a few bucks, so she launched her seminal polish: Happy Birthday, a sheer stuffed with glitter pieces of all sizes and colors. The idea was, “As you polish your nail, whatever landed on it was what you worked with,” she says. “You didn’t have to have the polish be so perfect. It could be a perfect mess.”

2010
“Colors started to get weirder,” she says. Thanks to Lady Gaga, who Lippmann manicured for the cover of Vanity Fair’s September issue that year (a greige hue called Waking Up in Vegas), nail shapes lengthened and “mannequin colors,” as in gray-beiges and foundation shades, became hot. “I took her nails a little longer for that shoot—more almond,” Lippmann says.

Lady Gaga with long gray nails, by Lippmann, on the cover of Vanity Fair.

2011
Lippmann pegs this year as the start of the nail art boom. “There was an explosion all over the market— insanity,” she says.  Lippmann adds that the movement started with people layering colors to try to get the most out of their nail wardrobe. “People were even making their own colors on Etsy,” she says. “Everybody’s creativity went berserk.” Brands also started introducing new textures. “OPI became really successful with crackle,” Lippmann says.

2013
Growing pains? Nail shapes continued to “go more and more stiletto—or pointy – until they became weapons,” Lippmann says.

2014
“We’ve hit the glitter and texture wall,” Lippmann says. They aren’t going anywhere, she adds, but for the recent Spring 2015 shows, Lippmann created more muted looks, such as a contoured nail for Eva Fehren using an opaque yellowish nude base with an iridescent white down the center. Or for Donna Karan’s runway collection, she created a dreamy “gray veil” over the nail, which she finished with a matte topcoat. “We’ve seen enough of the crazy nail art,” Lippmann says. “What I really think is cool now is that the look is more beautiful and sophisticated, but there’s still creativity.”