Shipping and returns

Delivery

Everything goes by tracked post within the UK. One price, one service: £3.95, or free once your basket reaches £30. Three pens costs £24.99 and doesn't quite get there; five pens costs £34.99 and does. We've been asked whether that threshold was set deliberately to sit just above the trio, and the honest answer is yes.

The threshold is worked out on what you actually pay for the goods, after any set discount has come off. It doesn't include the postage itself, which would be circular.

Orders placed before 3pm on a working day go out the same afternoon. Anything later goes the next working day. Working days are Monday to Friday, excluding bank holidays, and there is nobody in the building at the weekend to put a box in a van.

Once it's dispatched, expect it in two to three working days. Northern Ireland, the Scottish Highlands and Islands, and the Isle of Man usually take a day longer, at the same price — we'd rather absorb that than charge people more for living somewhere.

How it arrives

Pens travel in a slim card box that fits through a standard letterbox, so you don't need to be in and there's nothing to sign for. Inside, each pen sits in a moulded card tray with the shade number visible, which is the only reason we can pack a ten-pen box in forty seconds.

The outer box and the tray are card and go in your recycling. The pen barrel currently isn't a single material and so isn't cleanly recyclable, which we're not pretending is fine.

If it doesn't turn up

Give it until seven working days after dispatch before you worry — a small number of tracked parcels sit still for a few days and then arrive perfectly normally. After seven, get in touch and we'll chase the courier and send a replacement. We won't ask you to wait thirty days first, and we won't ask you to prove it's missing.

Tracking

You get two emails. The first confirms the order and tells you what's in it. The second goes out when the box leaves us, and carries the tracking number and a link.

Tracking usually goes live a few hours after dispatch rather than instantly — the number exists before the parcel has been scanned into the network, so a fresh number showing nothing is normal for an evening. If it's still showing nothing the following afternoon, that's worth an email.

If your confirmation email hasn't arrived within an hour, check the spam folder, then tell us with the email address you used. Roughly half the "my order didn't go through" messages any shop gets are a confirmation email in a spam folder, and the other half are worth investigating properly.

Outside the UK

We don't ship outside the UK yet. Not "contact us for a quote", not "coming soon to selected regions" — we genuinely can't, today.

The reason is boring and real. Nail lacquer is a regulated cosmetic and a flammable liquid. Shipping it across a border properly means the correct product notifications in the destination market, a responsible person named in that market, packaging and labelling that meets local rules, and a carrier contract that covers the goods. Doing any of that badly means your parcel gets held at a border, you pay a fee neither of us expected, and you blame us, correctly.

The EU is the one we're working on, because it's the request we get most. We're not going to attach a date to it. When it's ready it'll appear at checkout, with the duties and taxes position stated plainly on this page before you can spend anything.

If you're outside the UK and want to know when that changes, the newsletter is the only place we'll announce it, and we send it about twice a month.

Returns

You have 30 days from the day your order arrives to send back anything unopened, for any reason at all, including "I looked at it in daylight and went off it". You don't have to give a reason and we won't ask for one.

Unopened means the pen still has its seal and cap intact and has never been twisted. The outer box being opened is fine — you have to open the box to see what's in it.

The process

1. Email us through the contact form with your order number and which pens are coming back. You don't need a printed form, a returns portal login or a reference number generated by a robot.
2. We reply with the return address, usually the same working day. We don't publish it, because things sent to a published address without a heads-up have a habit of arriving with nothing to identify them.
3. Put the pens back in the tray if you still have it, or wrap them so they can't rattle. Include a scrap of paper with your order number on it. Anything unpadded usually arrives cracked and then we're both sad.
4. Post it, tracked. The return postage is yours to pay unless the item is faulty or we sent the wrong thing, in which case it's ours. Get proof of postage — it costs nothing at the counter and it's the only thing that helps if a parcel vanishes on the way back.
5. We refund within five working days of the parcel reaching us, and email you when we do.

If you'd rather swap a shade than get money back, say so in step one and we'll send the replacement out as soon as the return arrives, at no extra postage.

Why we can't take opened pens back

This is the rule people most often push back on, so here is the actual reason rather than a shrug.

A polish pen has a felt tip that touches your nail and the skin around it, and then goes back inside a barrel of lacquer. Once a tip has been used, that pen has been in contact with one person. There is no way to clean the felt without destroying it, and no honest way to sell it to somebody else.

So: if the seal is broken and the pen has been used, we can't accept it back for a change of mind, and we don't resell returned pens under any circumstances. It's a hygiene rule, not a stock-control one, and it applies to us as much as it does to you — used pens that come back get destroyed rather than quietly repackaged.

Two things this does not cover. A faulty pen is a faulty pen whether it's open or not, and is dealt with below. And this rule has nothing to do with your general statutory rights, which sit underneath everything on this page and which nothing here is trying to reduce.

If you're worried about committing to a colour you haven't seen in person, the set builder is the cheapest way to hedge — a trio of three shades is £29, which is less than the price of getting two wrong at £11.95 each. The full shade range is the free way to narrow it down.

Faulty or damaged

Different rules, deliberately generous ones. If something is faulty — a pen that won't feed after twenty-five twists, a cracked barrel, a cap that won't seal, a box that arrived crushed — then:

• Tell us within 30 days of delivery, opened or not.
• A photo helps and is not a condition. If you can't photograph it, describe it.
• Don't post it back unless we ask you to. Most of the time we won't — paying return postage on a broken £11.95 pen so we can look at it and agree it's broken is a waste of everybody's money.
• You choose: replacement or refund. Not us.
• Any postage involved is on us.

Before you write about a pen that won't feed, it's worth thirty seconds with the troubleshooting section — a new pen needs about fifteen twists before lacquer reaches the felt, and that catches out almost everybody the first time. If you've done twenty-five and it's still dry, it's faulty, and we'd rather replace it than argue about it.

Refunds

Refunds go back to the card or account that paid. We can't send it somewhere else, which is a rule imposed on us by payment providers and is genuinely not negotiable, however reasonable the reason.

We process within five working days of a return arriving, and usually faster. After that it's out of our hands: most cards show the money within two to three working days of us releasing it, some banks take up to ten, and there is nothing either of us can do to make a bank hurry. You'll get an email at the moment we process it, and that email is your evidence if you need to chase your own bank.

Postage refunds. If you return an entire order, we refund the £3.95 outbound postage too. If you return part of an order and the rest still adds up to £30 or more, nothing changes. If returning part of an order drops the remaining total below the free-delivery threshold, we don't claw the £3.95 back — that would be technically defensible and obviously mean.

Changing or cancelling an order

Message us as fast as you can and we'll almost certainly catch it. Realistically that means before 3pm on a working day, because after that the box is packed and in a sack.

If it has already gone, we can't recall it, but the 30-day return window covers you and you can simply refuse the parcel or send it back unopened.

Wrong address? Tell us immediately. Before dispatch it's a two-second fix. After dispatch we can sometimes redirect a tracked parcel and sometimes can't, depending entirely on where it is in the network. Either way, ask — the worst outcome is that we say no.

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Nothing on this page affects your statutory rights as a consumer in the UK. Where anything here is less generous than the law, the law wins, and if you spot a place where we've written something that reads as if it overrides your rights, please point at it — that would be a drafting failure rather than an intention.

Still got a question? The FAQ covers the shorter ones, and the contact form covers the rest.