Joni's Story

I emancipated myself at 17 as my home life was not exactlly a safe environment.

I managed to finish high school while living in foster care, and worked five jobs to put myself through college. I was the editor of my high school newspaper, so I started studying journalism. One of my required courses was biology, and something just clicked. I switched to biology and chemistry to understand how things actually worked at a molecular level. The work was hard, the hours were brutal, but I graduated with honors.

After college, I moved to Arizona and worked in a clinical lab, then cytogenetics. When an opportunity came up at Scripps in San Diego working on AIDS and cancer research, I took it. Then I moved back to Wisconsin to join an IVF clinic run by an ambitious Japanese doctor who had a vision for what reproductive medicine could become.

The field was still new, still figuring out basic techniques. I didn't know it then, but I was about to spend the next three decades at the cutting edge of technology that would help people build families.

The Science Years

The doctor I worked with wanted to do something that had rarely been attempted - single-cell embryo analysis to test for genetic conditions before implantation. We were one of the first labs in the world working on this.

I learned a technique called ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection) from the scientist who developed it at Cornell. I came back and taught my lab partner, and together we helped achieve some of the first births using these newest treatments for male infertility. It was groundbreaking work, but we weren't done pushing boundaries.

We started trying to grow embryos past three days to the blastocyst stage - something that wasn't standard practice yet. The work we did helped advance the science that would eventually support the stem cell research program in Madison.

We then turned our attention to something that had been a consistent failure in the field: egg freezing. Women had no way to preserve their fertility, as the existing methods didn't work. Eggs simply couldn't survive the freezing and thawing process.

I collaborated with Japanese scientists who were at the top of the field globally. They pointed me in the right direction, but the real work was experimentation - adjusting timing and temperature, making small changes, testing, failing, trying again. And then something clicked. I was able to successfully flash freeze an egg and thaw it, resulting in a pregnancy for the first time in the United States.

The survival rate was virtually 100%, and the technique I developed is still in use today.

The media attention came quickly - Glamour magazine, 48 Hours, the Today show. I traveled around the world teaching the technique to other labs and speaking at conferences. But here's the thing that mattered most to me: I didn't patent it.

I could have. I probably should have, from a financial perspective. But I published the research openly so that any lab, anywhere, could use it to help women preserve their fertility. The goal was never to profit from a breakthrough - it was to make it available to everyone who needed it.

After the egg freezing success, I was burned out. I'd been working at an intense pace for years. I explored some other opportunities, worked at a lab in Chicago, but eventually got accepted into a PhD program in Madison.

Along the way, I married my lab partner. He had three small children, and together we had two more. We were raising five kids while I commuted 90 miles each way to work on my PhD. It was chaos, but it was good chaos.

Life Transitions

During those years raising kids and working on my PhD, my son was diagnosed with ADHD and anxiety. The doctor who evaluated him looked at me and said, "You know, I see a lot of the same traits in you."

I'd masked it my whole life - pushed through, compensated, found ways to make things work. But getting diagnosed with ADHD and mild autism in my 30s reframed everything. Suddenly, a lot of my life made much more sense.

In 2007, we moved to the East Coast. The doctor we'd been working with in Wisconsin was getting older, and it was time for a change. I spent the next 15 years in the New York area running different IVF labs, including Director of Operations at the University of Connecticut.

Sadly, my marrige ended after 15 years, but eventually, I met Padraic, who also had two young kids. Helping to raise two more children wasn't on my bingo card, but sometimes life just works that way.  We got married, and I retired from science.

For the first time in my adult life, I wasn't working in a lab. I'd spent three decades helping people build families, pioneering techniques, teaching, publishing. It had been an incredible career, but I was ready for something different.

I just didn't know what that would be yet.

Animal Rescue

When an opportunity to get involved with animal rescue came along, I jumped at the chance. My husband and I had rescued parrots, and I always found it to be incredibly fulfilling.  Cats though, were a different story, especially since I was allergic.

But I absolutely fell in love with them when we took in that first foster, and at one point we ended up with 7 cats in the house.  I was turning into a crazy cat lady, but I loved it.

What I wasn't prepared for was the soul-wrenching loss that can come with rescue. Many of the cats I fostered were not in great shape.  While screening is supposed to keep FELV from running rampant through a household, it still found its way into our group, and we lost a number of cats in a short period of time.

While I don't regret the time I spent in rescue, my heart just couldn't take the loss. We still have a few cats and a dog who are all rescues, and we donate a portion of our profits every year to a friend's rescue.

The Polish Chapter

Since I didn't need to commute to New York anymore, we decided to escape the chaos and move to New Hampshire. It allowed me some time to think about my next move, and enjoy the peace and quiet for a while.

After COVID hit, I tried painting my nails for the first time in decades. In the lab, I could never wear polish because the chemicals weren't safe around embryos. But now I could experiment with color and creativity in a way I'd never been able to before.

I loved it, and loved the Indie Polish creativity. Lots had changed since the days of drugstore polish. But as I explored the indie nail polish world, I kept noticing things that could be better. Polishes took forever to dry. Orders took months to receive. Lots of color combinations simply didn't exist, like thermal polishes that shifted through three different colors. Crackle polishes barely cracked. Glow-in-the-dark formulas were dim, gloopy, and disappointing.

With a chemistry degree and three decades of laboratory experience, of course I thought I could formulate something better.

So I started experimenting. Different formulas, different additives, testing dry times and durability and color combinations. I found a formula that worked the way I wanted it to - fast-drying, vibrant, long-lasting. And so, I decided to start a business.

The same principles that guided my scientific career applied here: make something excellent, make it accessible, share what you learn. Drunk Fairy Polish was born.

Success Made Me a Target

The business grew faster than I expected. We were doing things differently - keeping polish in stock instead of creating artificial scarcity, pricing fairly, sourcing ingredients directly. It disrupted how many established makers operated, and ultimately, made me a target.

In 2024, while I was grieving my father's death, someone approached me in a nail polish making group with some questions about polish. She was kind, we seemed to have everything in common, she sent thoughtful gifts, and we spent hours talking about everything. I thought I'd found a new friend during one of the hardest times of my life.

What I never would have suspected was that she was recording our conversations - illegally, without my knowledge or consent.

Months later, she suddenly cut me off from our mutual chat groups. When I asked why, she told me she was going to ruin me and my business. That I didn't deserve this success. The texts were vile and hurtful, like they were coming from a completely different person.  I had no idea what was happening or why.

A few weeks later, one of our partners dropped us, and then another. Eventually, I learned that she had edited the recordings, stripped away context, sent them to our partners and whoever else she could think of, and then posted them publicly. The goal was to paint me as someone I'm not, and therefore ruin me and the business. I still don't know why.

I couldn't defend myself because anything I said would sound like excuses.  I apologized becuase everyone told me I had to, even though I knew my words had been twisted into something that painted me as someone I'm not.  She turned a sarchastic comment into an attack, a bad joke into hate. The narrative was set, and I had no way to change it.

The response was immediate. Sales disappeared overnight. Our team quit. Trolls feasted on the content online, and a mob mentality took over. The hate mail was relentless. Even people who I thought were my friends believed the lie. I fell into the deepest depression of my life, and saw no light at the end of the tunnel.

There were people in those mutual chat groups who could have stood up for me. Told the real story. Exposed this person for the vile human being that she is. But they were too scared of what she might do to them.

Lessons Learned

I've learned that that grief makes you vulnerable, and there are people who will exploit vulnerability for their own gain. I've learned that success breeds jealously. And I've learned that rebuilding from something like this requires a hurculean effort to keep going. Especially when people you thought were your friends abandon you.

I'm still here because this business means something to me - not just the polish itself, but what it represents. Quality that's accessible. Products that are always available. Treating customers with respect instead of manipulating them with artificial scarcity. Seeing the joy that a beautiful mani can bring.

If you're reading this, you deserve to know who I actually am. I'm someone who spent three decades helping people build families. Someone who published groundbreaking research instead of patenting it for profit. Someone who dedicated years to helping lost animals. Someone who believes in making beautiful things accessible to everyone.

I'm not perfect. I've made plenty of mistakes. I’m brutally sarcastic at times. I have a temper. But I’m most certainly not the person that edited recording tried to make me be.

Why I'm Still Here

Today, I'm in the workshop every day - formulating new polishes, testing combinations, solving technical problems that make colors shift and glow and crack in ways they haven't before. It's the same kind of work that kept me in the lab for 30 years: figuring out how to make something that appers to be impossible become possible.

The business is thriving. What seemed like a death blow at the time was actually a wakeup call. We expanded into new markets. Streamlined our systems. Found new partners. Improved our formulas. Created new product lines. Built a better team. 

The drunk fairies are real in the sense that creativity often feels like chaos - happy accidents, unexpected combinations, late nights when everything suddenly clicks. But behind that chaos is precision, chemistry, and someone who genuinely loves this work.

Every bottle of polish we make carries the same values I've held my entire career: do excellent work, make it accessible, and never stop trying something new.

Welcome to Drunk Fairy Polish. I'm glad you're here.

 - Joni

CV, Papers, and Press Mentions

Curriculum Vitae
Scientific Papers
Freezing Eggs: UConn Offers Women Another Option
The Center for Advanced Reproductive Services Announces First Births from Frozen Eggs
Egg Freezing Changed Women's Lives