‘Breathable’ nail polish huge hit
PRZEMYSL, Poland, Feb 27, (AP): For Zaida Saleh, like for many observant Muslim women, manicures have long posed a religious problem.
With prayers five times a day, and a pre-prayer ritual that requires washing the hands and arms, traditional fingernail polish has been mostly off limits because it prevents water from making contact with the nails.
A new “breathable” nail polish by a Polish company, Inglot, is changing that.
The company and some Muslims say the polish is the first of its kind because it lets air and moisture pass through to the nail. A craze has built up around it with Muslim women in recent months after an Islamic scholar in the United States tested its permeability and published an article saying that, in his view, it complies with Muslim law.
“It’s huge,” said Saleh, a 35year-old who hadn’t polished her nails in many years but immediately went out and bought the product in five colors, including a bright pink, a burgundy and a mauve. “I am excited. I feel more feminine — and I just love it.”
The news of Inglot’s breathable polish has in recent months spread quickly from woman to woman and over the Internet. It also has given Inglot a boost in sales of the product, called O2M, for oxygen and moisture.
The nail polish now stands as one of the final life achievements of Wojciech Inglot, a Polish chemist and entrepreneur who developed it to create what he billed as a healthier alternative to traditional nail enamels, which block the passage of moisture and oxygen to the nail. He died suddenly on Saturday at the age of 57 after suffering internal hemorrhaging, and was being laid to rest on Wednesday in his hometown of Przemysl.
Inglot has been the recipient of several business leadership awards for taking an enterprise that he started in 1983, when Poland was still under communist rule, and turning it into an international success. A Polish award he received last year praised him for “proving that Poland is a country where innovative technologies go hand-in-hand with beauty.” Today his company has shops in almost 50 countries, including one at Times Square in New York City and boutiques in malls from Moscow to Istanbul to Dubai.
Ritual
Though the Muslim holy book, the Quran, does not specifically address the issue of nail polish, some Islamic scholars have said that water must touch the surface of the nail for the washing ritual to be done correctly.
Some Muslim women might put nail polish on after finishing the last prayer of the day before going out, and then take it off again before dawn prayers. They can also wear it during their periods, when they are excused from the prayers, but some find it embarrassing to do so because it could signal they are menstruating. Some simply don’t want to take the trouble of getting a manicure that won’t last long.
“It was a big headache for me to put it on only for five days, so I didn’t wear it for a long time,” said Saleh, who was born in Sri Lanka but now lives in Anaheim, California, where she is a teacher of preschool and kindergarten level children. “This was a huge breakthrough for me. We are supposed to cover up, but nowhere does it say ‘don’t be fashionable.’”
Nobody was more surprised by the splash it made with Muslims than Inglot himself.
“I don’t think there is a single Muslim living here,” Inglot said in an interview with The Associated Press nine days before his death at his factory in Przemysl, near the border with Ukraine. “We didn’t even think about this.”
Inglot began about four years ago to develop the formula for the breathable enamel, which uses a polymer similar to that in the newest generation of contact lenses.
Inglot said the chemical formula is “tricky” and “quite expensive” to produce, and that the profit margin on O2M is not high. However, he said he was determined to develop a breathable polish knowing that consumers are ever more focused on health and expecting them to welcome a varnish that would let the nail breathe.
He said the enthusiastic Muslim reaction to the product began after an Islamic scholar, Mustafa Umar, published an article on his blog in November declaring it permissible. The result was a “serious increase in the sale” of O2M. Inglot said the company was unable to immediately meet all requests for orders, but that the phenomenon was so fresh that he didn’t yet have any figures on sales.