You will cancel your manicure appointment after getting this amazing news. Soon you’ll be able to beautify your nails with some real stuff. Yes, in anytime soon, you’ll get access to nail paints containing real metals like gold, silver and platinum.
A team of researchers has now developed a novel way to make nail polish healthier for your nails. Adding real metals to the nail polish with minimal additives can result in durable, tinted and ‘anti-bacterial’ nail colouring.
Current nail paint manufacturing techniques use pigmented powders and additives, which may not be healthy for your nail bed. Scientists are now looking for ways to use the nanoparticles in the nail polish. This can improve their durability and the silver nanoparticles will do wonders to treat toenail fungal infections.
Marcus Lau, Friedrich Waag and Stephan Barcikowski are devising new ways to use nanoparticles in nail polish.
The researchers have already started the research work with store-brought clear nail paint bottles. They added small pieces of silver, gold, platinum and an alloy to them. They used laser to break the metal particles into nanoparticles.
This research resulted in a wide array of colours as well as transparent nail polishes with a metallic shine. The researchers also used the laser ablation to create a master batch of metal nanoparticles in ethyl acetate, a polish thinner. They could then add these nanoparticles in the bottles of nail paints.
This technique can also be used to prepare coatings for medical devices.
