About us
Painting your own nails well with a brush is a skill. Not a mysterious one — people learn it — but a skill, involving a wobbling handle, a load of wet lacquer and a hand that is not your good hand. Sunday Polish is what happened when we stopped trying to teach that skill and removed the need for it instead.
It's a pen. A matte black barrel, a precision fibre tip, and 5ml of water-based colour. No lamp, no acetone, no appointment. The rest of this page is why, what's in it, and what we're still getting wrong.
The honest origin
A polish brush is a soft, loaded, round-tipped tool that flexes the moment it touches the nail. To use one well you have to load it correctly, hold it at a consistent angle, move at a consistent speed, and correct in a single pass because a second pass drags the first. That is four things to get right, on a moving target, with your weaker hand.
Most of us fail at exactly one of them and the whole nail looks wrong. Thick at the cuticle. Thin at the tip. A ridge down the middle where the second stroke caught the first.
A precision fibre tip is stiff. It doesn't flex, so it doesn't wobble. Its edge is roughly the shape of the curve at the base of your nail, which means the tool does the tracing rather than your hand. It meters its own colour, so you can't overload it. You are no longer painting. You are drawing a line, two or three times, and drawing a line is something everybody can already do.
That's the entire product thesis. There isn't a founder story about a wedding, or a bad salon appointment, or a moment of clarity in an airport. There's a design problem and a different tool.
The product
A matte black barrel holding 5ml of colour, fed to a precision fibre tip. No dipping, no wiping on a bottle neck, nothing to knock over onto a sofa. We reckon a pen does somewhere around 120 nails, which is roughly a dozen full manicures — that's our own rough count rather than a measured figure.
There is no curing step, so there is no UV or LED lamp, and therefore no UV exposure to think about at all. It's touch-dry in about sixty seconds on its own. Your nail is never filed, etched or cured to make the colour stick.
Because it's water-based, the film sits on the surface of the nail rather than gripping into it. Soak your hands in warm soapy water for a minute or two and it lifts away in pieces. No acetone, no ten-minute soak, no foil.
Sixteen shades, every one an opaque crème — each with its number printed down the barrel in cream, so you can reorder the one you actually liked rather than the one whose name you half remember. Pens are £11.95 each, and cheaper in multiples: three for £24.99, five for £34.99, ten for £59.99. Sets arrive in a coral-pink flip box with the wordmark printed inside the lid. Build a set or take one we've already made.
Formula
The colour is water-based. Water carries the pigment instead of the solvent system a conventional lacquer uses, which is why it has almost no smell, why it washes off rather than needing acetone, and — less conveniently for us — why it goes on thinner and wants two or three coats instead of two.
It is also HEMA-free. HEMA is a monomer used widely in gel and gel-style products, and it's the ingredient most often linked to people developing a sensitivity over time. It isn't in ours. We've stopped putting that on the banner, though, because an air-dry lacquer was never a likely place to find it. True, and worth about as much as telling you our polish is gluten-free.
What it isn't is a health claim. We're not saying this is good for your nails, or that it will fix anything, or that other products are unsafe. We make nail polish, not medicine. If you've ever had a reaction to a nail product, talk to your GP before using another one — including ours.
And no lamp means no curing step, which means no UV exposure in the process at all. That isn't a claim about anything, it's just an absence.
The rest is policy rather than chemistry. It's vegan — no animal-derived ingredients, which in nail polish mostly means no guanine, the fish-scale pearl. Nothing in the range needs it. Every shade is a flat crème. And it's never tested on animals, by us or on our behalf, at any stage.
You won't find a certification mark anywhere on this site, because we haven't applied for one. When we do, we'll name the body and print the number. Until then these are our own stated policies, which is exactly as much weight as you should give them.
Most of these simply aren't needed once water is doing the carrying.
5ml per pen. The full ingredient list prints on every barrel and will appear on each shade page at launch.
Values
Values are only interesting when they cost you something. These four have each cost us a sale, a shortcut or a bit of margin.
Water-based colour goes on thin, so two to three coats is the real range and the pale shades want three. It won't last as long as a solvent lacquer, because that's the same property that lets it wash off without acetone. If we hide either of those until after you've paid, we've just bought a complaint at full price.
No countdown timers, no "seven people are viewing this", no invented low-stock warnings. If something is genuinely nearly gone we'll say so, and if it's gone we'll tell you when it's back rather than taking your money and hoping.
You will not find an invented award, a made-up percentage, a "clinically proven" or a dermatologist we have never met on this site. We sell nail polish. It's a nice thing, not a medical device, and dressing it up as one is a small lie that makes every other sentence less believable.
The apply guide and the FAQ are not gated, not email-walled and not padded out to hit a word count. If somebody reads the whole method and decides they'd rather keep using a brush, fine. At least they'll be better at it.
The no list
The team
Sunday Polish is small. Small enough that when you email in, one of these people answers, and small enough that a bad Tuesday shows up in the dispatch times.
Heads up: Sunday Polish is a demonstration store and hasn't launched. The people below are illustrative — placeholders standing in for roles that would exist. No real person's name, face or history appears on this site.
Formulation
Spent a decade in cosmetics labs before this and is unmoved by anything described as a breakthrough. Responsible for the fact that the crèmes cover in two coats and the tip doesn't dry out between Sundays.
Colour
Chooses and rejects shades, which mostly means rejecting them. Killed eleven pinks to keep five. Argues that Chalk is the most useful thing we make and has yet to convince anyone else.
Words and support
Writes the guides, answers the inbox, and is the reason the apply guide is longer than anyone budgeted for. Holds the view that a good help page is cheaper than a returns department.
The fourth is Tom, who does the boxes, the couriers and the spreadsheet, and who declined to have an avatar drawn.
Candour
Every brand has a list like this. Most of them keep it in a document nobody outside the company reads. Here's ours.
This is the trade. A water-based film sits on the nail rather than gripping into it, which is the same property that lets it wash off without acetone. We reckon most people get three to five days with a top coat and rather less without one, against maybe a week from a good solvent polish. If you want a fortnight, you want gel, and you'll want a lamp and a soak-off with it.
Water-based colour goes on thinner than solvent lacquer, so two to three coats is the honest range across the board, and Chalk and Rosewater want three. We've reformulated Chalk twice and it's better. A pale opaque crème is still the hardest thing to ask of a thin film, and we'd rather you knew that before the second coat.
A new nylon tip is dry, and needs to be pressed and held against a tissue for several seconds before colour comes through. People give it a second, see nothing, and reasonably assume the pen is broken. We should have printed that on the sleeve. We're printing it on the next sleeve.
Sixty seconds to touch-dry is a normal-room number. In a steamy bathroom, or on a muggy August evening with the windows shut, water-based colour takes noticeably longer to flash off, and if you rush the second coat it drags. There's no formulation fix for this. There's just a window.
EU delivery is the single most common request and it isn't solved. Getting cosmetics across the border properly involves paperwork we'd rather do correctly than quickly. The current position is here.
The coral-pink flip box is lovely, and a magnetic closure and a foam insert are not the easiest things in the world to recycle. Nor is the pen barrel, which isn't yet a single material. So we are currently a company that sells you a small plastic object in a beautiful box and says nice things about card. We know.
What's next
A water-based top coat, so the whole manicure can stay one chemistry instead of two. A single-material barrel. Delivery into the EU, done properly. And a refill system, because a 5ml pen you top up is a better object than a 5ml pen you replace, even though the second one earns more.
Beyond that, not much. We're not planning a skincare line or a candle. There is a surprising amount of work left in doing one small thing well.
Most questions are answered on the FAQ page, and the delivery and returns detail lives on shipping and returns. If neither covers it, write to us — Frankie reads everything and answers within two working days.