“BB cream nail polishes are a nude toned, sheer glaze for your natural nails,” says Lou Stokes, ORLY’s UK Ambassador, who likens the effect to “an instant beauty filter.”
It’s about coating your natural nails “with light coverage that blurs out any imperfections – exactly what a BB cream does for your face,” agrees nail artist Mateja Novaković, who suggests that BB cream nails can be created with both a sheer polish and a gel manicure.
“At one point this was only achieved with beige sheer polishes,” she says, “but last season we saw more diversity in BB cream shades – lilac, white, cool pink and peach – topped off with a high shine for that glowy, healthy look.”
With its sheer, milky shades, Gelcare zeroes in on the makeup benefits of a BB cream and its blurring effect masks the appearance of ridges and yellowing. Likewise, Nail Inc’s Got Me Glowing Glow-Enhancing Nail Perfector Polish adds a shimmering coat to brighten naked nails.
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Other BB cream polishes go one step further as care and colour products, treating the natural nail surface with ingredients borrowed from skincare to prevent breakage and peeling.
Mateja recommends Bio Sculpture’s Gemini Nourishing Nail Polish in Sweet Candy Breath, a vitamin-infused soft candy pink hue. She’s also a fan of Manucurist Active Smooth, a glossy beige colour that is laced with alpha hydroxy acids (AHAs) to exfoliate the outer layer of dead skin cells and castor oil fibres to fill in ridges.
According to Gaëlle Lebrat Personnaz, founder of Manucurist, it’s a “one-step BB cream nail manicure” with ingredients to “smooth, strengthen and promote the healthy
regrowth of nail keratin fibres.” In other words, the nail care equivalent of glazed donut nails.