From the Met Gala to Macaulay Culkin’s blue toes, matching nails are back – with a twist
Originating in the 1950s, the trend is back with stars like Joey King on the red carpet, and the Home Alone actor at Paris Fashion Week
By the late 1960s, youth culture started dismantling that logic, and the coordinated manicure drifted fast into the category of things you simply didn’t do. It started to read as overdone, too obviously assembled, and even though nobody wrote the rule down, everyone somehow knew it.
Some of this comes down to timing. The 1950s approach to matching manicures demanded uniformity – the whole look had to tell one story, and your nails were part of the official version. What’s happening now works on a different logic, closer to how bags, shoes and jewellery have been styled for years. Pulling a colour from a print to choose the right pair of shoes, or picking a clutch that echoes one tone in a dress rather than the whole thing has been standard styling advice for a long time; arguably, nails are just catching up. “What I’m seeing now is much more about finding one colour in your outfit, not necessarily the main colour, and letting the nail pick it up,” says professional manicurist and international nail educator Fran Méndez. “It’s more about coordination – not so much matching.”
There are multiple approaches to the trend. One way is to match a colour exactly; another is to go tonal: staying in the same colour family without choosing an identical shade.
“A precise match works best when the shade in the outfit is distinctive,” Méndez says. “Pulling the exact rust from a printed blouse, for example, makes the choice feel deliberate. But when the dominant colour in an outfit is something neutral, a shade within the same family can be better than the shade itself.”