How the Northern Lights Inspired Essie’s Winter 2018 Collection

by Lesa Hannah November 9, 2018

Seeing the northern lights—electrons thrown from the sun’s atmosphere by the rotation of the sun are blown toward the earth by the solar wind, mix with gases in the earth’s atmosphere and then glow—is on Rebecca Minkoff’s bucket list. In the meantime, as Essie’s global colour designer, Minkoff has used them as the theme for the nail brand’s Winter 2018 collection.

The six shades ($10 each) range from a gold chrome (“Million Mile Hues”) to an iridescent pink (“Polar-izing”), but it was “Glow with the Flow,” a blue pearl shimmer, that Minkoff was super-specific about. “I was trying to get it like that,” she says, pointing to a photo of a geode on her mood board. After creating five versions, which involved using very fine glitter and experimenting with pearlization, she finally settled on the one that made “that hologram glow exist within the bottle but then on the nail, too.”