It's all about image and creating a colorful, creative environment. Make-up manufacturers use snazzy packages, names and colors to make consumers feel different and express aspects of themselves that are not otherwise apparent. "When people come to the counter, I want people to laugh, to get a good giggle out of a product" says Wende Zomner creative director of Urban Decay cosmetics.

Oil Slick. Ozone. Frostbite and Shattered -- the list continues. Urban Decay prides itself on having "created entirely new looks and options in beauty to appeal to fashion-forward women and men with a yen for experimentation and self-expression." When asked how the company chooses names and colors, Zomner replies "for the most part, someone just throws a name out there and it sticks.... the staff feeds off it and makes it better." She says that sometimes, certain names evoke specific colors such as Spare Change. "We knew exactly what colors it was supposed to be. It needed to look like coins, thick, heavy silver," said Zomner.

Provocative and interesting names sell.

"I've bought several bottles of nail polish because the name suited me. I currently have four bottles of very nearly the exact same shade of white just because the names are Iced Green Apple, Iced Cherry, and so on. I like the way the color looks in the bottle more than anything, and they usually just end up standing in a row on my dresser," says one 15-year-old girl from Texas. She owns 62 bottles of nail polish and hardly ever wears any of it.

Mohajer founded Hard Candy when she was a 22 year old pre-med student. Frustrated by the lack of options in nail polish colors, she began mixing colors to match a pair of pale blue sandals and called it Sky. She came up with four pastels, named Sky, Sunshine, Lime and Violet and then sold them to a trendy store in Los Angeles. Hard Candy is now worth over a million dollars. When asked about how she comes up with such attention grabbing names, she says "I just sit around and come up with the names with my boyfriend! He's also my business partner, along with my sister. It's the three of us. We listen to music and come up with names."

Make-up for men?

Mohajer's futuristic, city-slick environment has attracted an unlikely cosmetic clientele: men. Candy Man is Hard Candy's line of men's nail enamel, sporting names like Super Man, Testosterone and Dog. Mohajer says that her products are typically geared for a female audience, but that the male line is fun and not a mainstream thing. Her more masculine colors have been spotted on nails of such stars as Dennis Rodman, Quentin Tarantino, and of course, her boyfriend. "But this is not about makeup. This is about fashion. It's about fun!" said Mohajer.

That's what men say when discussing why they wear nail polish. "I can't explain, it's fun," says Joe, who has a blue thumbnail.

Not everyone is joining the "ugly" pack...

More traditional companies such as Revlon have followed the lead of the smaller companies by introducing "ugly color" lines. But not everyone is convinced. Prescriptives is a make-up brand that likes to keep up with the times, but refuses to follow the pack. Vice President Rory Gevis, says "we're sophisticated, modern, not trendy."

Prescriptives' product environment is natural and earthy. With names such as Cocoa, Nutmeg, Raisin, Prescriptives tries to match each individual with her "exact color". Names are occasionally developed in daily board meetings held at Prescriptives headquarters, but according to Gevis, "The most creative names are when you are having a cup of coffee, when you leave the everyday environment and go and do something. That's where the inspiration comes from…the names come from the color itself, sometimes it is so obvious," said Gevis. "Women are women. Make-up brings out the little girl in all of us. Our products should make women confident, sure and comfortable."

What's next?

In the world of fashion, popular trends cycle out almost as soon as they make it to the pages of fashion magazines and the shelves at your local drug store. What's next? Well, during a recent fashion show in Manhattan, Naomi Campbell wore a three-and-a-half-inch bamboo fingernail - attached to her pinkie. In London, models' nails were equipped with corkscrews, wires, and skewers, as if they were human Swiss Army knives.

Trend watchers say the next big thing will be piercing nails or even bondage nails. These trends are difficult to predict, especially when the fashion comes from the catwalks of fashion shows and filters down to the street. It is unclear if the Edward Scissorhands look will take off, but if it does, we can expect the name game to become even more bizarre.