BrainStuff Classics: What's the History of Nail Polish?

the nails was a natural next step. The Chinese took the nail game up level sometime around three thousand BCE. They created a sort of nail varnish using a mixture of egg whites, beeswax, gelatine, amarabic which is a sap from the acacia tree, and alum, a compound frequently used in dyeing to help colors stick. These varnishes were then colored with flower petals or gold or silver dust. They further personalized the looks with artificial nails made of silver

and gold, covered with jewels or closwine as well. These elaborately designed and colored nails were exclusively reserved for royal classes only. Around the same time, the Babylonians were getting into the nail game, but it was the warriors who were wearing color. The men pigmented their nails with coal, which is finely powdered sulfide before going into battle again.

Even among these soldiers, class mattered. Higher class warriors had their nails colored with black coal, while lower class fighters used green coal. Enna has also been found painted on Egyptian mummies, including their nails. Nail colour signified class in Egypt too. The redder ones nails in ancient Egypt, the more power that person had. Queen Nefertiti, the stepmother of King Tutan, common, wore dark red nails, a color rumored

to have blood in it. Cleopatra is said to have painted her nails from the juice of the hennaplant, which created a deep and rusty color. Women of lower rank were only allowed to wear pastel colors colored nails were popular in Europe by the Renaissance era, when trade with countries in Asia opened up. Coloring and bejeweling nails hit another high in eighteenth century French quartz, where outlandish fashion trends were the rage. By the Victorian era, women were

creating color and shine with tinted oils. Women were also using tinted powders and creams on their nails to give them color and shine. That apply the mild abrasive and buffet for a shiny look, but it took time to apply the powdered cream, polish and buff each nail. In nineteen sixteen, q Tex changed that when it introduced its first clear nail lacquer. Painting a layer of shine on

fingernails became much easier than all that buffing. It wasn't until the early twentieth century that polish as we know it came into existence, though, and we have the automobile industry to think. In the nineteen twenties, automotive paint was invented, and not long after French manicurist Michelle Minard adapted the

formula to create opaque nail polish. Her employer, Charles Revson, knew a good thing when he saw it, so he and his brother Joseph launched a new company, Revlon, with the first colored nail enamel appearing in nineteen thirty two. Manicures were far from being the exclusive territory of the upper classes at this point. A bottle of q Tex nail polish cost thirty five cents in nineteen thirty four and affordable luxury in a time of type purse strings.

When America entered World War II and women joined the workforce in huge numbers, manicures changed accordingly. Long nails were not going to last doing shift work at the factory. Even the New York Times ran remedies for motor mechanic hands. Rather than trying to keep up brightly painted nails, women working manual jobs turned back to clear polish or even buffing with cream polish. After Manard invented colored nail laquer, women were having their nails coated from base to tip

with solid colors. But it didn't take long before the French manicure became a mark of sophistication. Rather than using two colors as we often do today, women would leave the moon at the base of the nail and the tip completely and very carefully unpainted. Black nail varnish was introduced in the nineteen thirties, though there's no evidence of any soldiers getting their nails done a lah the Babylonians.

At the same time in England, women were having landscapes painted onto their nails, a level of detail not attempted since the Chinese Closbonne nails of nearly five thousand years before. You can now find nail polish nearly everywhere, in nearly every color, and for as little as a few dollars a bottle, But the echoes of the upper class Chinese, Babylonian, Egyptian and French still linger in products like Acid Tour's

Black Diamond Polish. It contains two hundred and sixty seven carrots of black diamonds and costs a cool two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a bottle.