New China Glaze iPhone app: Finally, a way to match your nails to Bosco's cheeks

Until last week, if I'd to pick a Shania Twain song to sum up my ambivalence towards nail polish apps it would likely have been That Don't Impress Me Much. And not just because it's the only Shania Twain song I can think of off the top of my head. Most feel to me like a fairly lame attempt by brands to clamber aboard the app bandwagon – I'd coin “bappwagon”, but I'm starving and it just makes me want a sandwich – eschewing any truly useful features in favour of a product catalogue and maybe some virtual “try it on” gimmickry.

Here, you can control things like the nail length, finger length and skintone of a simulated hand to best reflect your own digits, and then select one of the brand's nail polish shades to appear on the nails (the idea being that this shows how the colour would look on you.) I've tried these tools a few times but ultimately I think they're quite useless: the polish shades themselves are at best a very vague approximation of their real life counterparts and there's no filter to accurately recreate my pale, sallow, and red-in-places skintone.

As a result, any nail apps – napps, perhaps? – that I've tried on my iPhone have ultimately ended up deleted within mere minutes of download... until now. The new app from China Glaze has the ubiquitous “try it on” option, but what's piqued my interest is its nifty “match a colour” feature.

Bosco's cheeks = City Siren. Now we know.

Take or upload a photo of anything you want to colour match and BOOM – the app finds and shows you the eight best potential matches, none of whom have ever uttered the words “you know, I don't sweat much” on the first date. (True story; happened a friend of mine and one of her perfect matches. Although, to be fair, a showstopper like that's probably not something a dating site algorithm can predict.)

The China Glaze app costs exactly zero pee and although it's currently only available for Apple devices, it is in development for Android right this very minute.

What do you reckon, is it a gimmick or genius? And what would you like to colour match with it?

Me, I'm off to see if I can find a match for Jean Byrne's sequinned electric blue frock...

Selected Sally's beauty suppliers stock China Glaze polishes in Ireland; you can also buy online from Beauty Emporium (who I see have some shades on offer for a fiver.)