Acquarella: A closer look at water-based nail polish | Emerald City

If there's one beauty product that makes environmentalists queasy, it's nail polish. The glossy stuff's known for containing some of the most hazardous ingredients of all personal care products, including formaldehyde, phthalates and toluene. In fact, nail polish is considered hazardous waste in California.

"There is no purely nontoxic nail polish," says Umbra, eco-advice woman at Grist.org, and advises that "If you are willing to give up one beauty product, make it nail polish." More recently, Sarah van Schagen tried out five supposedly less-toxic conventional nail polishes, concluding that "The chemical smell from all of these suggests that pursuing your polish habit may not be the best bet for your health."

Yet despite that toxic history, eco-preneurs haven't given up on nail polish. Walk into Whole Foods and you'll see a few brands of "green" nail polish lines that tout themselves as better, safer alternatives. And while some of these have often eliminated the worst of the chemicals, only a close study of the ingredient list will reveal how green these brands' eco-claims are.

Enter Acquarella, self-described as "a safe, non-toxic, water-based alternative to conventional products." Acquarella piqued my interest when I heard it would participate in the Green Beauty Panel event last month. I wasn't able to make it to the event, but decided to give the nail polish a try.

Open a bottle of Acquarella nail polish, and the first thing you'll notice is that the stuff doesn't smell like a noxious stew of chemicals. Acquarella prides itself in avoiding formaldehyde, phthalates and petrochemical solvents. I tried on the purplish "vamp" color; the nail polish dried about as quickly, and lasted about as long, as conventional nail polish! The Acquarella nail polish remover -- which also didn't have that strong, chemical smell of regular removers -- worked quite well, though taking off the polish did seem to take a few extra minutes. Afterward, my nails looked normal and healthy -- not stained, dry and stripped as they tend to look when I wear then remove conventional nail polish.

But how eco are Acquarella's claims? Sniff test aside, I really had a tough time figuring out exactly how safe Acquarella's products are, mainly because the ingredient lists are so vague:

Full ingredient list for the nail polish: water, acrylic polymer emulsion, non-toxic colorants.
Full ingredient list for the remover: water, tall oil fatty acids and alcohols (plant-based), nonionic surfactant, organic buffer.

Notice how unspecific most of these ingredients are. "Acrylic polymer emulsion," for example, is a broad category; some of these emulsions are considered unsafe. "Non toxic colorants" doesn't actually give us any idea what ingredients give Acquarella polishes their color. That, plus both "nonionic surfactant" and "organic buffer," say more about the function of these ingredients versus revealing what the ingredients actually are.

This vagueness is something the company plans to fix, according to Mark Deason of Acquarella, who says a more specific ingredient list -- specific enough that the products can be entered into the Environmental Working Group's consumer-oriented product safety database, Skin Deep -- should be available by the end of this month. In the meantime, Deason said the "acrylic polymer emulsion," is a styrene-acrylate copolymer, and that the "non-toxic colorants" are similar to the stuff in kids' water paints.

Label-reading picky environmentalists may want to wait to pick up Acquarella until the company does indeed come out with its more specific ingredient list, which then will allow Skin Deep to give Acquarella products a safety rating. Acquarella products are available locally at the Hall Center in Santa Monica, as well as online on Amazon.

Of course, some environmentalists will never like nail polish, safe or not. After all, Acquarella doesn't apologize for the fact that it is all-synthetic -- nor does it market itself as a necessary product. But for those not ready to give up their nail painting habits (in typical ambivalent fashion, I don't paint my fingernails but do paint my toenails), Acquarella's available as a safer, less-smelly alternative.

Top photo by Shelli Friedberg via Flikr; bottom photo courtesy of Acquarella