It all started with a bottle of Essie nail polish in the shade L’Orangerie. Back in 2020, Shana Eichenberg, the creator behind the popular TikTok account Vintage Dusties, was trying to up her at-home manicure game—and this orange-y red hue was one of the bottles in her smaller collection of polishes. Upon closer inspection, she realized it was unlike the modern Essie bottles she’d been using.
“It didn’t have the current embossment; it had a different label,” Eichenberg tells Allure. As a self-described hyperfixator—who also has an archaeology degree—she was eager to know what era of Essie the bottle was from. When she attempted to find basic information about the color online, her efforts were futile.
“There were absolutely no swatches of [L’Orangerie] online,” she says. That lack of intel inspired her to start documenting the history of other possibly-forgotten nail polishes. “I wanted to give that color, and others, a little footprint on the internet.”
Four years later, Eichenberg’s become something of a noted archivist in the vintage nail polish space. Under the Vintage Dusties handle, her metier is finding, reviving, and applying enamels from as far back as the 1920s. Even her youngest polishes are more than a decade old.
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It’s a niche topic, but niche topics can excel on social media—and Eichenberg is happy to have found her people. “As an introvert, I thrive online,” she says. “I don’t have to be vulnerable. I can put what I want out there. But also keep what I want to keep. It’s been really fun.”
Such content is catnip for her followers, many of whom enjoy recalling simpler times when Wet ‘n Wild polishes were only $1. “Millennials are nostalgic for their younger years,” Eichenberg says. “Then there’s Gen Z, who are nostalgic for times they didn’t even live in.”
Millennials were especially engaged with one of her videos this past July when she posted her nails wearing Hard Candy’s Frigid—the exact shade of icy blue Lindsay Lohan wore as Hallie in the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap. The episode, as Eichenberg calls it, delighted her viewers. “Now THIS is journalism,” one commented, while others begged her to find a dupe for the long-gone shade.