After many, many years of producing the most brilliant nail polish shades but in a sub-par, easy-chip formula, Chanel have completely revamped their nail offering and it’s good. It’s really good. The new longwear polishes are just that – longwear, with the nude shade lasting a full week on my tin-opening, dried-weetabix-scraping, car-tinkering hands.

I’m going to come back to the longwear polishes in another post (this website might be a bit Chanel-heavy for a week or so, I’ve done a bit of a blitz through their new collection) but I couldn’t hesitate when it came to today’s subject: Le Vernis Nail Gloss. It’s very rare that I try a product and then run straight to my laptop to write about it – especially a nail varnish – but that is precisely what’s happened today. The Nail Gloss from Chanel is so good that if you have even a modicum of interest in your hands, you need to paint this on them.

In the bottle the gloss looks faintly disappointing – a transparent varnish with a reddish tint. The sort of thing you’d expect would stain your nails a wishy-washy pink, as though you’d coloured them in with a felt-tip pen. Or the kind of expensive extra step that might add a reddish sheen over your base colour, a luxury top-coat for those with money to burn. No, friends, no: wishy-washy this is not. Surprisingly, it’s full of pigment and one coat leaves your nails the sort of bright, punchy, fiery red that is almost a rule when it comes to summer beauty.

But there is a hint of sheerness there, a bit of transparency – it’s like painting your nails with a very rich and glossy form of strawberry jelly. It has the visual bounciness of a gel, with a hi-shine finish that looks chic and pulled-together, but the punchy colour of a traditionally opaque polish. I can’t get enough of it.

I’m hoping that the lasting-power is good – it doesn’t mention “longwear” on the box, so I’m not going to have the highest expectations in terms of longevity, but then I’d happily repaint with this every other day. Application was a breeze. And I keep staring at my fingers and thinking about holidays, which is never a bad thing.

Chanel Le Vernis Nail Gloss in Rouge Radical is £18 from Selfridges here. It’s part of the new Le Rouge Collection No1 (more on that later) and so I’m guessing it’s limited edition, but PLEASE Chanel, more colours in this gloss formula!