If you wear long nails, you know that they can make it hard to use touchscreens. But a new type of nail polish may change that. When pressed to a screen, this polish disrupts the screen’s electric field — which the device detects as a touch. That could one day let people use their long nails like styluses to navigate phones, tablets and other devices.
“This is huge,” says Shuyi Sun. It shows that practical functions “can be embedded invisibly into everyday cosmetic[s].” A computer scientist, Sun works at the Association of California Nurse Leaders in Sacramento. She did not take part in making the new nail polish. But she has studied how to make cosmetics that can sense information about the body.
Touchscreens are often made of glass. A thin, see-through coating on that glass creates a small electric field. When another electrically conductive object — such as a fingertip — contacts the screen, it disturbs that field. The device registers that disturbance as a touch.
But fingernails are nonconductive. They don’t distort a screen’s field. So they don’t register as touch. People with long nails ...
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