Shortly after Beyoncé performed her career-defining set at Coachella music festival on 15 April, fans on social media went wild for one particular detail. After the singer changed out of her varsity style-yellow cropped hoodie and denim shorts into a glittering all-black ensemble, some eagle-eyed Twitter users started sharing images apparently showing she'd changed her nail colour from black to silver. It was immediately jumped on as an example of the 36-year-old's legendary attention to detail, with one user declaring "Beyoncé changing her nail colour during her Coachella set is the level of extra we all need to achieve." Apart from there's one catch – it may never actually have happened.
© Photo: Getty ImagesBey has black nails in this photo agency picture from the performance
Buzzfeed journalists Ben Henry and Ellie Bate have painstakingly reviewed all footage and images from the event and come to the conclusion that Beyoncé's nails in fact stayed black the whole way through the two-hour set.
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"The first place to start was the performance so I took great pleasure in watching that again. Indeed, she started with black nails," they wrote in an article. "But at the point when I thought she was meant to have silver nails, they were still black."
They explained that they then searched photo agency sites for pictures of the performance but could only find ones taken right at the start. "That's when I realised that every other professional photo I'd seen of the performance came from Beyoncé's website. And then the realisations started to come quick and fast. It was a 10 second rollercoaster of realising things," they explained.
The pair pointed out that, although the pictures on Beyonce's website and Instagram look like they were taken during the performance, they actually come from what was probably a dress rehearsal. Some were posted before the performance began, and in others it's clear to see there's no crowd. Bey simply had silver nails on during the dress rehearsal – and therefore her website pictures – and black ones during the performance.
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Fans disappointed that Queen Bey didn't reach quite this dizzy level of perfectionism can take solace in the fact that the world's greatest entertainer managed to wear an incredible five different custom Balmain outfits throughout the set, some embedded with hidden meanings and messages, such as an Egyptian Queen bust and a black panther.
