Nail Picker

See the colour on your own nails.

Photograph your hand, photograph the swatch, and see that exact colour on your own nails before you paint.

Download on the App Store iPhone, iOS 16.4 or later.
A hand lying on woven cane, nails in a warm terracotta nude with a soft sheen. The same hand and the same pose, nails in a bright pillar-box red. The same hand again, nails in a deep near-black with a faint plum cast. The same hand once more, nails in a pink glitter that runs from bright pink to deep rose.
Same hand, four shades she tried on in the app.

How it works

  1. One

    Photograph your hand

    One photo, in daylight if you can. Nail Picker finds each nail on its own — no tracing, no stickers, no holding still.

    The capture screen: a hand lying flat, filling the frame, with a dashed outline showing where to place it and the prompt "Lay your hand flat".
  2. Two

    Photograph the swatch

    Real painted lacquer, not a name from a catalogue. Tap the colour in the photo and Nail Picker reads the shade off it, sparkle included.

    The new-shade screen: a photographed glitter swatch tip with a magnifying loupe over it, picking the exact colour out of the photo.
  3. Three

    See it on your nails

    Paint every nail or just one. Try a french or a half-moon, adjust how sheer the colour sits, then save the result to your camera roll.

    The try-on screen: the same hand wearing the glitter shade on every nail, with a row of the user's own saved swatches below.

Real screens from the app. Your photos stay yours — see the privacy policy.

Why your own swatches matter

Most try-on apps hand you a palette someone else invented. You pick a colour you like, and then you own a colour you cannot buy — or you buy it and it turns out to be nothing like the square on the screen.

Nail Picker works the other way round. Every shade comes from a swatch you photographed yourself — real painted lacquer, in your light, with its own shimmer and depth carried across. So the question stops being which of these colours do I like and becomes the one you actually had: which of mine should I wear tonight.

A swatch is honest about the colour and nothing else. It is a tip, not ten nails — your nail length, your shape and your skin tone all change how that colour reads. This is the part the swatch cannot tell you.

About your photos

Your hand photo is sent to our server to find your nails, and on to the outside services that run the detection. Photos of your swatches stay on your phone. Nothing is used to train a model, sold, or shared with advertisers.

Read what is collected, and for how long.