It started when a makeup artist applied a black marker over red nail polish—a technique every sixth-grader with a Sharpie would recognize. Dominique Moncourtois, a makeup creator at Chanel, invented a shade that would almost immediately gain cult stature, freeing us from rigid rules and condemning us to waitlist purgatory.
In 1994, Chanel Vamp made its debut on the Paris runways. The blackberry nail color introduced gothic depth and carnal intensity to consumers fed a steady diet of wan neutrals and one-note reds. The response? Ravenous.
Madonna herself reportedly called Karl Lagerfeld himself the day after the Chanel show to request samples of the opaque polish. Although social media hadn’t even been born yet, Vamp went viral. Supply quickly outpaced demand, and stores were forced to ration their bottles. Some customers took matters into their own hands by blending different polishes to approximate a Vamp-y effect.
But the real Vamp was more than a sum of its parts. It represented a break from tradition, dismantling the idea that nail polish had to be so … polished. Before 1994, the goal of nail color was to give hands a plush appearance, as though they had never washed a dish. Even daring pigments with provocative names, such as the fictional “Jungle Red” from the 1939 film The Women, signaled wealth and privilege. With its subversive black undertones and wicked gleam, Vamp conveyed a devil-may-care attitude—and flipped the script on ladies who lunch.
Stores were forced to ration their bottles.
“I’m going to go to the bathroom and powder my nose,” said Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, moments before her character sniffs cocaine and enters a dance contest. The choreography seemed almost designed to showcase Vamp; Thurman twists her bare feet as though she’s extinguishing invisible cigarettes (she’s wearing Vamp on her toes too) and swings her hands at the wrists like some glorious T. rex. The scene secured Vamp’s status as a pop-culture phenomenon and gave it the sort of staying power that eludes most trends. (The movie has been preserved in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.) Pulp Fiction also placed Vamp squarely at the intersection of glamour and danger, revealing beauty’s darker side. The underlayer had a habit of surfacing whenever it was time to remove an old coat of Vamp—a chore that required enough acetone to dissolve the finish on a Cadillac. The resulting pile of stained cotton balls resembled a crime scene and felt like a metaphor for throwaway culture. If painting Vamp on our nails boosted our ego, taking it off tugged at the conscience.
This overlap of regret and desire was at the heart of Madonna’s 1994 music video “Take a Bow,” which arrived shortly after Pulp Fiction and relied partly on Vamp to help promote its emotionally charged theme. Dressed in a fascinator and peplum like a classic film-noir heroine (or a future Eva Peron—the video reportedly served as an audition tape for Evita), Madonna portrayed the neglected paramour of a famous bullfighter and seemed to revel in her anguish. At one point in the sepia-toned video, she pierces her thumb with a brooch and brings the bleeding wound to her mouth. The black-red drop is a dead ringer for her Vamp nail polish.
Unsurprisingly, given its relationship to blood and camp, the nail lacquer landed a role in the 90s television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Deploying the verbal equivalent of an eye roll, a clique of popular girls declares Vamp to be “so over” in the first episode. Bless their hearts. Didn’t they realize that not even teenage scorn could drive a stake through this trend? New formulations (Metallic Vamp, Very Vamp) kept demand alive, and by 2000 Vamp was reported to be the fifth-best-selling nail polish in the world.
After briefly discontinuing Vamp, Chanel resurrected it with a shimmery wine finish. And in 2015, the company launched an entire makeup collection built around the original shade—more than two decades after its initial release. Call it an outlier or a vampire, but that’s one unnaturally long lifespan for a beauty trend.
Vamp’s most enduring legacy has nothing to do with its ability to defy the odds (although that’s good) or broaden the beauty landscape to include gutsier colors (that’s good, too). The real essence of its power is that it dared to conjure the depth and dimension of our darkest, strangest moods—instead of just glossing over them with a rosy hue. Vamp appealed to our vanity and our humanity. No matter how you slice it, that’s good for the soul.
Liana Schaffner is a Massachusetts-based writer who frequently contributes to Allure, Harper’s Bazaar, and Town & Country
