Men's Nail Polish Joins the Cosmetics Market

A few years ago, Josh Espley, a former marketing exec for a sex toy company called Fleshlight, noticed that his kickboxing friends were wearing polish to cover their banged-up nails. The practice was becoming popular, he noted, with the mixed martial arts crowd: Former Ultimate Fighting Championship star Chuck Liddell famously sported dainty pink fingernail polish in fights. Espley occasionally reads Us Weekly—to help him chat up women, he says—and saw polish on male celebrities such as Zac Efron, Jared Leto, Dave Navarro, and Johnny Depp. So in 2009, as a way to supplement his income, he created Blakk Cosmetics. Its first product was Alpha Nail paint, which the company sold in $12 pens in colors like “cocaine” (creamy white), “burnin’ rubber” (dark navy), and “gasoline” (charcoal gray).

Alpha Nail’s website shows bloody, filthy fingers dabbed in nail paint; the hand models grapple with each other, fix a car, fire a rifle. “Our site is way over the top. We thought we had to really make this clear that it’s for men,” says Espley, 35, from his Houston home. He softened the marketing approach somewhat after discovering how many non-MMA, nonartist, nongay men have bought his product. “It’s shifted to the everyman who wants that extra little flair,” he says. The company sells about 400 pens a month. “It’s profitable in the sense of our overhead [being low], but as far as a great salary, that’s different,” Espley says.