About ten years ago, two women in California found the selection of nail polish colors lacking and decided to do something about it. Sandy Lerner, co-founder of Cisco Systems, sought edgy, dark colors to match her alternative tastes. Dineh Mohajer, a pre-med student in L.A., wanted to duplicate the color of her pale-blue sandals onto her nails. The resulting two companies, Urban Decay and Hard Candy, triggered a late ’90s nail polish phenomenon that took women far beyond the traditional reds and pinks. Urban Decay went hard core with color names like “Asphyxia” and “Plague”, cementing a trend started by Chanel’s blood-black Vamp polish, worn by Uma Thurman in 1994’s Pulp Fiction (black polish was already of course a signature of certain punk and goth types). Mohajer’s Hard Candy went soft and sweet, with a matching plastic pastel ring encircling their bottle tops and Clueless sensation Alicia Silverstone tossing the company a huge free ad with her baby blue nails on David Letterman.

In the years since, Urban Decay and Hard Candy were snapped up, at different times, by LMVH, the luxury goods conglomerate. Both were then sold to the Falic brothers who own Duty Free Americas. As we all know, fashion returns consistently back to old fads, so it’s no surprise that Hard Candy has released a “vintage” line that includes their original pastels in new, less toxic formulations. Urban Decay seems to have left the nail polish biz to its sibling brand, but Chanel unveiled Satin Black, a Vamp for the new millenium, to great hype and shortages last fall. As for those two women who wouldn’t settle for what was on the makeup shelves, Sandy Lerner retired to a spread in Virginia and Dineh Mohajer founded Goldie cosmetics.