In the past couple of days, I’ve spotted two different young women — coincidentally, but not pertinently, on the subway — sporting two different shades of nail polish: One for the fingernails, and a different one for the toenails.

It’s not like I’ve never seen that phenomenon before. But in both cases, the colors were so opposed to one another — they both had a bright-pinkish polish down below, and a dark/black one up top — that it was grabbed my attention. I ascribed the first instance to simple laziness: She didn’t bother to either redo the unmatched set of nails, or to wear shoes that would at least cover up the mismatch. But in the second case, I noticed that she was spending a fair amount of time examining the color jobs on both her hands and feet; so she was certainly paying enough attention to her look.

Is this a new fashion trend? Sure enough, Elle Magazine is advocating creative detours away from the “unwritten rule” of matching nail polish for all twenty digits. But from perusing those examples, they mostly seem to pair up just variations on the same hue, like dark-red/dark-pink, etc. To me, those match. The live-action displays I saw, not so much.

But I guess that with the genie now out of the makeup bottle, there’ll soon be no restrictions on the mixing-and-matching colors the ladies will be sporting on their cuticles. Probably have to wait until next summer, when toes are more often on full display, to see the effect.