Swatches From The Atelier: August 8, 2025
At our Old City nail salon, color is never random. It’s a feeling. A forecast. A quiet mirror.
This week, Philadelphia fell under a stretch of cloudy midsummer skies—hushed light, softened days—and perhaps it’s no coincidence that the women who sat at our table reached for deeper hues and velvety moods.
Some chose their swatches for their gel manicure as if written in the stars—aligned with their astrological charts, in the exact tones that have always felt like home. Others wandered farther than usual, stepping outside their comfort zones, letting instinct (or the weather) decide.
Among this week’s Swatches From The Atelier: a parade of pinks in every imaginable tone, the kind that feel like both punctuation and poetry. A luminous iridescent chrome made a rare appearance—a hard to find “Unicorn chrome”. And for the very first time in this series, someone chose black. Bold, precise, arresting.
Each of these gel swatches was selected as the final layer of The Signature Foundation Manicure—not just for beauty, but for resonance. For the lives they quietly protect.
Gel manicures, done differently.
Always health-first. Always built to last.
We don’t often see black swatches for our Signature Foundation Manicure in the middle of August, but after this client’s choice, call us obsessed. An arresting cat-eye, we’re immediately pulled away from our busy lives into the beautiful starry nights.
A radical departure from all other chrome finishes, the iridescent “Unicorn” chrome is one of the most requested swatches at our Old City nail salon—and for good reason. This particular product—the perfect mix of intrigue and restraint—took us a while to source.
At Atelier Anaiis, we uphold the reputation for being able to mix and create any shade of color imaginable. That being said, the team at our Old City nail salon are also obsessed with trying new single-color offerings from luxury gel polish brands—this one is one of the most intriguing recent additions to our collection, a pink cat-eye with green tint mixed in.
Our clients at our nail salon in Old City have a particular affinity for blue swatches for their gel manicures in the summer. This swatch though, reminiscent of faded turquoise, was a unique treat.
For the clients at our Old City nail salon that love their yellow swatches, finishing their butterfly yellow gel manicure with chrome powder is a perfect choice for setting the mood to go back to work after a beautifully languid vacation.
Orange cream sodas are a special drink to some of us, harkening back to childhood days sipping and looking out the window, as beads of condensation formed from the summer heat. This swatch pays tribute to that memory, with a touch of extra citrusy brightness.
Nude manicures are a bit of a speciality for Atelier Anaiis, where we custom mix shades to create the perfect nude manicure for each client’s skin tone and how they wish to present themselves to the world.
A joyous ode to decadent, berry flavored pink lollipops.
This custom white nude swatch harkens back to more subtle times. Not only is the color of the gel manciure elegant, the almond shaping of the nails exquisite.
The finishing on this pink swatch is singularly gorgeous, like seashells in pristine water.
At our Old City nail salon, we believe that every client has a nude manicure that belongs to them. This client chose to add to hers with a perfectly restrained chrome finish.
What we love about this swatch is that it just as easily could have been in earlier summer editions of Swatches From The Atelier, and not this week, with its overcast skies. But that’s what we’re about at Atelier Anaiis—helping our clients express who they are, and who they’re becoming.
