April 18, 2012 • 29 mins
Nail polish sales have skyrocketed since 2011, and historically nail polish and colors denoted class from ancient China to Victorian England. Tune in to learn how Revlon turned modified auto paint into a billion-dollar beauty industry.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff Mom never told you?
From house Stuffworks dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline, and today let me describe
(00:22):
what my nails look like to you listeners and to
you because you gotta look really, really close to see
the faint remainders of a manicure that I got a
few weeks ago because I was a maid of honor
and a wedding. I'm very proud of that, and the
bride sent a just you know, a mere suggestion of
(00:47):
the women should the bridesman should get manicures, and so
I still have the remains of bubble bath on my nails.
Sounds lovely. Yeah, it was a very very very faint
pink I see, which, as we will learn later in
the podcast, was a lot like some of the earliest
manicures into Vogue exactly. But I'm not I don't I
(01:10):
typically don't wear nail polish on my fingers. I've actually
started wearing nail polish a little bit more often than
I used to because I don't know why color on
my nails to me, makes my hands look strange. It's distracting.
It can be distracting if you pick a wild color.
But I can't actually get manicures too often, A because
I don't want to spend the money. But be Um,
(01:31):
I have really kind of flimsy nails and nail polish
doesn't quite stay on. We'll just slide right up, just
into a puddle right at my fingertips. Yeah, it's it's
hard to stay on, and so I don't want to
spend I mean, I can see spending the money to
get like one of those man manicures, you know where
they where they do the lotion and they do the
the trimming and the buffing and whatever, the little hand massage,
(01:55):
but they don't actually put the polish on, Like I
would go in for that. But I don't want to
go pay for expend to polish, especially gel nails. It's
a lot to keep up. Um. And even though you
and I are not huge nail manicure fanatics, we wanted
to talk about nail polished today because of two articles
(02:15):
that came out in the New York Times Style section
the first week of April that had really hammered home
the fact nail polish is having quite a moment. It
is never mind the entire long history of nail polish.
This is the era of the fingernail. This is now
(02:36):
for the nail. Nail polish has become, according to the
New York Times article by Ruth law Fair, la the
fastest growing segment of the beauty trade, with sales even
higher than lipstick. And speaking of lipstick, we got to
talk about the economy and women's cosmetics for a minute,
because we've talked about the lipstick index before, which was
(02:58):
this phrase that was is created by Leonard Louder of Estay,
Louder saying that during the Great Depression, lipstick sales went
up because it was still a small luxury that women
were able to purchase. So if you want to see
how the economy is doing, watch cosmetic sales because when
they go up, the stock markets probably going down. Now,
(03:20):
this is a theory that a number of economists have debunked.
But sorry, folks, we've got to introduce you to the
lacquer index, right Uh, the whole lipstick index flash. Lacquer
index idea was spot on in because nail polished sales
were up thirteen point seven per cent, and if you
just look at Revlon alone, their sales were over one
(03:40):
point three billion dollars in And there are some examples
of how nail polished brands are really sparking, just kind
of with some insanity people. Chanel, Yeah, Chanel, there was
this color. I don't I really don't want to try
to bust out of French accent right now. I never
(04:03):
took French, I did, so it's it's a color. It's
like a mushroom gray color. That is a French word
for particular. I'm not gonna say it either. I feel foolish. Particular. Yeah,
that's close, and that's all I got. Just if you
want to pronounce the French word, just say it in
the back of your throat like you're coughing, and that's
what it sounds like. Particular perfect nail polish. Also, that'd
(04:26):
be hard to say if you were wearing it. I
was like, oh, what color is that? You'd have to
bust that out. It's particular. But yeah, there was this
two thousand tin color from Chanel, which was really just
a gray brown, pretty drab color. It was so popular,
um it was called the it color for that year.
That they were waiting lists and bidding wars on eBay,
(04:50):
and NBC New York mentioned um that the previous Chanel
It color, which was jade, much easier to pronounce. It's
not it's not jah day perhaps jade. A bottle of
jade on eBay fetched up to two hundred bucks. I mean,
I don't understand. I do think it's interesting that Chanel
(05:13):
is such a leader. I mean, Chanel is a fancy brand.
Most people can't afford their clothes or their handbags. But
and this is the whole idea behind like simple luxuries
when the economy is bad, Chanel nail polish is very
popular and it's a major trend setter. It's funny because
when they put out a color, they're immediately waiting lists
(05:33):
and people bidding over it on eBay, and then the
copycats start, and then it ends up in magazines, and
then it ends up on your fingers because all of
a sudden, you think, hey, maybe mushroom isn't so ugly,
so there you go, or if you don't like mushroom.
Ruth la Farrett New York Times also reported on a
niche company called Strange Beautiful that apparently introduced a color
(05:56):
meant to mimic menstrual blood. That's right. I mean, aren't
there a million kinds of reds? Couldn't you just pick
one without having to do that? I mean, menstrual blood
is a pretty particular shade of red, apparently, I guess, yeah,
for everybody, it's different. I don't know, I don't know.
I don't know. That is a good question. But anyway, um, yeah,
(06:20):
so it's it's apparently having this fashion moment, and also
the New York Times I'm i gotta say it laughably
followed up with a reactionary piece too, green and yellow
shades that are having a moment right now, thanks two
stars like Katie Perry and Nicki Minash, who were also
(06:40):
with the crazy colors on their nails, and Stephanie Rose
and Bloom went on interviewed a number of men to
get their thoughts on these green and yellow shades, and boy,
howdy do they not like them? Know? And Richard Dorman,
and editor at Esquire, was particular pularly upset. I mean,
(07:02):
he really has it out for these colors. He said,
it's the color of mucus, it's the color of infection,
It's the color of old piano keys. But no, he
doesn't stop. There, doesn't there, he doesn't, He keeps going.
He really yellow must have hurt him as a child somehow.
He says, it's like wearing ugs, it's like wearing ponchos.
(07:23):
It's all of the things that can found the male psyche.
So he's basically pointing out, like women, why do you
do such weird things that don't appeal to men? Why
would you ever do something like that? Although I gotta
say hats off to the guy she quoted, not not
dormant from Esquire, but she quoted another guy comparing the
yellows and greens to old school high see um Ecto cooler,
(07:48):
which was the promotional drink for Ghostbusters. Right, I drank
that in second grade. Yeah, and he knocked it. Now
you can rock it on your fingertips. I know. But
why are we talking about nail posh? Because the thing
is with these trend pieces, they are kind of funny
when you consider the history of nail polish that goes
back as far as oh, five thousand BC. There's nothing
(08:13):
new about us painting our nails. Yeah, we I mean,
we do it for various reasons. But it's been going
on for quite a while. It just seems like maybe
we're wearing more outrageous shades more often. But let's talk
about the history. Yeah. Back in five thousand BC, women
in India were dying their fingertips with hanna, which is
still it's not an unusual practice today either. Um. And
(08:36):
then in three thousand BC, the Chinese painted their nails
with an interesting mixture of egg whites, beeswax, gelatine, arabic gum,
and vegetable die and the color was chosen according to
what the ruling dynasty was, usually red or black, depending
on who was in power. I wonder if there are
d I Y nail polish makers who use that Chinese
(08:57):
recipe out there. Maybe it just seems like they would
chip off or something. Flake off, fall off be heavy
and gross. I don't know. And then in six d BC,
and this is coming from a slideshow off of Refinery nine,
aristocrats during the Child dynasty in China started wearing these
nail guards that look kind of like bugles when you
(09:19):
put them on your fingertips, but but rather than being
made out of corn product of course, um, these nail
guards were made of gold and silver and bejeweled, right,
symbolic of wealth and leisure, because I mean, it's not
like you could do anything with those things on your fingers.
If you've ever tried to type with bugles on your hands,
(09:39):
bugles are also the snack of wealth and bega too exactly.
And going into Egypt, because as we all know, Egyptian
women were trend setters. The upper classes used hannah or
sometimes ox blood to achieve a red hue, and the
red or the color, the higher the class. So in
accord to some of the things we read, Cleopatra preferred
(10:02):
brick red. She liked a deeper color. And then hopping
forward a number of centuries to the four hundreds, I
thought this was really cool. Inca's actually invented nail art
as we know it. Uh, they would paint intricate pictures
of eagles on their nails. That's I guess it passed
the time. Um, and you know, we we didn't have
(10:25):
a whole lot of nail nail art history in the
Dark Ages in Europe. They were just trying not to die,
things to worry about. Um. But women during the Renaissance
began manicuring their nails, although they avoided color. So they
weren't you know, going out and getting blood to dye
their nails with. They were just buffing and shine and
just buffing and shina. And then during the Victorian era,
(10:47):
um translucent manicures were popular. It was it was a
sign of inner purity if your nails were kept buffed
and cleaned and polished yea, And they would use different
oils to keep them all nice and shiny um. And
in nine the first patent for nail polish was granted,
and it was a modification of car paint that had
(11:09):
a syrup light consistency and a faint pink color, which
Kristen was referring to earlier when she talked about her
very faint wedding manicure. It was they weren't going crazy,
they weren't going dark red or anything controversial. I mean,
it was the Victorians people. Yeah, I think about it
kind of like a lip stain rather than lipstick, just
that that very um thin coating of paint. And then
(11:32):
in the nineteen twenties the Flappers come along and really
red things up on the nails. Yeah, they started the
ever popular moon manicure, which I had never heard of,
But I feel like it's It's all over the internet.
You google moon manicure and people are crazy for it.
We'll tell everyone what a moon manicure is. It is
painting sort of in the middle of the nail, over
(11:55):
your little little moon shape, paler skin on your nail
bed and leaving the tips bear. Although there was a
variation that painted the whole nail except for the moon.
It looks pretty cool. And like you said, there are
a ton of vintage advertisements for early nail polish online
that show off that that moon manicure if you want
to check it out. Um and Flappers also popularized the
(12:18):
boulder red nails. But the nineteen thirties is really the
decade of nail polished modern nail polish, because in nineteen
thirty one, Charles Revson gets a job selling cost medics
for Elka, which was America's first opaque lacquer brand. And
this is coming from a history article off of the
(12:38):
Daily dot com um And so he starts selling this
nail lacquer and then he teams up with his brother
Joseph and Charles Lackman and starts the Revlon Nail Enamel Company.
And then in spring nineteen thirty four, Revlon cream colored
polish takes off. But this is a revolution nary product
(13:00):
because rather than just being more of a stain, it's
actually that hard enamel cover that we think of today. Right,
And French makeup artist Michelle Minard is credited with the idea,
supposedly inspired by auto paint, which makes sense. And in
the nineteen twenties um colors, the color spectrum of nail
polish really opened up because of the invention of synthetic
(13:22):
pigments and solvents. And also on a side note, because
of that, there was a trend in the nineteen twenties
in France where green nails it was modeled off of
highly toxic green fuselage paint for aircraft, suffering for fashion,
suffering for fashion. But because we have those synthetic pigments
and solvents, we have more colors available. And then Revson
(13:44):
and his friends come along and create the uh or
recreate I guess the formula for nail polish. Not everybody
was so happy with all of these trends in nail polish, however,
Dr Carl Manager in four told the American Psychiatric Assists Actian,
you know those darn flappers. He said that bobbed hair
and painted nails were self mutilations as serious as anorexia
(14:07):
and self cutting, so he thought that doing anything unnatural
was just horrible. Well, it was like how the you know,
excessive use of cosmetics, even just putting on red lipstick
started out being associated with prostitutes and actresses who were
not held in a very high regard until the rise
of Hollywood and the whole movie culture, which is then
(14:29):
trickled down through the flappers. So red nails, wanton woman,
well manager was in the minority because that same year,
dentist Maxwell Lap created the first set of fake nails
for clients who bit their nails, So that's where we
got that from. And then in nine another dentist, Frederick Slack,
(14:52):
accidentally invented the acrylic sculpting nail extension when he was
trying to mend a broken nail with acrylic. Thank you dentists,
they were all of this nail technology, and really they
weren't busy enough. Uh. In the nineteen sixties, pastel shades
started to gain popularity, and in the seventies that's when
those long fake nails really became popular and took off.
(15:13):
And beauty salon started opening at a higher rate to
answer demand, and in nineteen seventy six, something that is
not actually French was invented. What happened Jeff Paint creates
the French manicure and he is the one who founded
Orally in nineteen seventy five. And then in the nineteen
eighties we've got, you know, the wild and wacky neon
(15:34):
day glo kind of colors. And then in the nineteen nineties,
um a lot of red and nude comes back in
the style, along with got to talk about goth and
grunge and black nails, but especially chipped black nails. But
you didn't need nail polish for that. You could just
get a sharpie color in your nails a little bit.
(15:55):
You're done with it right what it was in that Chanel,
speaking of their trendiness, came out with Vamp, which was
a really dark red color, and that I feel like
just created pandemonium. And then in the two thousands we
have the quote unprecedented level of interest in nail art
where we start seeing more commonly nail adhesive gel polished
(16:15):
at last for a really long time, nail art, you know,
you can get cheetah print on your nails. If you
want fishnet print, you can get your your honey's face
printed on your nails, right, or your cat or whoever. Um.
I actually I've tried gel polished before and it absolutely
decimated my nails. Yeah, the first time I ever did it,
(16:38):
I was like, oh my gosh, this is what fingernails
can look like with the manicure. And you know, they're
called the two week manicures because they last so much
longer than regular nail polished. But the stuff that I
had to soak my hands in to get the stuff
off was I don't know, it had to be completely
and awfully toxic because my fingers just like disgusting afterwards.
(16:58):
So maybe that's not for me. I would of caution, um,
and we have I should mention that. Um. We did
a podcast now probably a couple of years ago on
nail salons and all of those chemicals that go into
manicures that you might want to watch out for that
can also cause some health problems for nail salon workers.
(17:20):
So we've established that nail polish has quite an extensive history.
It's nothing new that we're doing, but one thing that
seems pretty consistent, especially when you get down to the
more granular level of what's happening and all of the
fads in the twentieth century, it is very clearly something
that becomes associated with beauty and women. While plenty of
(17:45):
men might go get manicures, the kind where they just
clean up your nails, still for a guy to have
on nail polish is a gender bending kind of activity
that we first really saw in pop culture in the
nineteen seventies with Freddie Mercury and David Bowie sporting blackmail
polish and other colors. Right um A Laura talks about
(18:09):
Evolution Man, which is a brand of four men only
nail polish, and founder Marco Burrodini had fun painting his
own nails in an effort to stop himself from biting them,
and he said that I love strong colors that make
a bold statement with a stark contrast on the skin.
And he talks about whether men get the perfect clean
(18:29):
manicure suggesting success or power, or a bold color to
show they're not confined to society's rules. It's a way
to express who they are, to which I say, really, yeah,
I mean, do you really need nail polish? For a man,
because isn't the mere fact of creating that kind of
product for a man, because you have similar products now
(18:50):
with makeup to like concealer for men, all these four
men that I mean, I get it, marketing and all
of that, but it's just can't, can't, can't any I
just go grab a thing of Chanel particular because I'm
not going to say it in French. Again. Well, yeah,
there's that, but there's also I mean, is this a
(19:10):
realistic trend? I mean maybe for rock stars or what,
I don't know whatever, but is your average banker or
lawyer going to go pick up a bottle of man
polish and painted fingernails? Well, and there is still the
thing too of if you are a woman in a
nine to five job, if you're wearing a suit to work,
I mean, how often do you see those kind of
(19:32):
women with super outrageous manicures. There is still kind of
a message that it sends if you're not sort of
sticking to the more standard kinds of manicures. And again
it's like, are we are we putting too much into um?
This nail polished at New York Times also had UM
an entire room for debate section interviewing I think six
(19:56):
or eight people on what this means that we're painting
our nails with front colors, and it's everything from oh,
well we've just always done this, to the economy to
gender to um what else? Just oh luxury and all
of that and expressing yourself. Well, you mentioned women, you know,
not wearing wild colors in the office. Jennifer Scanlon as
(20:16):
part of this big New York Times Peace. She's a
professor of gender and women studies at bowd Wine. She
says that the emergence of crazy nail colors as a
mainstream trend is an issue of privilege and deprivation. And
the whole privilege issue is that women must be feeling
more at home in a greater variety of settings so
they can enter professional settings more comfortably on their own terms,
i e. Wearing green nail polish to work well. And
(20:40):
if she brings up deprivation too, even though she doesn't
pointed out in the column she wrote. Jennas Sours from
Jezebel also contributed to the Room for debate on nail polish,
and she brings up the fact that nail salons have
proliferated things to cheap labor and lax regulatory oversight of
the spot in industry, and so we're really relying on
(21:02):
a lot of I mean, this is more going and
getting your nails and not just buying nail polish and
doing it yourself, obviously, but there is still that side
of it too, where it is fueled by a lot
of immigrant labor and exposure to dangerous chemicals on a
daily basis, which all of this has contributed to lower
prices because I mean, have you ever seen a shopping
mall without a nail salon. I feel like there's one
(21:24):
in every single corner I could pick in my neighborhood.
I could pick from like three to go to and
within walking distance. And so this, you know, lower prices,
more people being able to get manicures. Although you know,
a lot of these pieces that we read kept connecting
a bad economy with little luxuries like manicures. But if
I'm not doing so well financially, I'm going to cut
(21:44):
back on manicures too, because I mean, if I wanted,
I could go buy a bottle of nail polish at
the drug store and paint my own freaking nails. If
I wanted to. But that's what some of these articles
we're talking about, that the nail polish and beauty industry
create eats trends to get people to go back to
the store and buy another bottle of nail polish by
(22:06):
that crackle polish that does weird things on your fingernails,
get jail nails. You know. There's even one nail polish
you talked about that has iron filaments so that when
you hold a magnet over your nails, it makes an
image like it pulls up the filaments to create some
kind of image. That just seems like it takes so
much time and then you have to carry out a
magnet everything to show people the images on your nail.
(22:28):
I think it just doesn't when it's wet. But um.
One one huge debate that came up about nail polish
that perhaps to me was the peak of absurdity was
in April of two thousand eleven, when the J Crew
creative director Jen Alliance was featured in one of the
j cru catalogs painting her young son's toenails pink, and
(22:50):
there was a caption with it it says, Lucky for me,
I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is
pink toenail painting is so much more fun in neon
and ins entity ensued. Firestorms freaked out, saying, you're painting.
First of all, you're painting and boys tonails, and that
is an activity reserve for girls. Also, you're painting it pink.
(23:10):
You are screwing up this child's personal gender schema. Jenna Lions. Yeah,
she is clearly ruining her son's mental state for the
rest of his life, because obviously he will remember this
forever and it will stick with him and other boys
will beat him up and this will be the worst
thing that has ever happened to him. It was really
portrayed that way. Yeah. Aaron Brown for the Culture and
(23:31):
Media Institute said that the magazine spread features blatant propaganda
celebrating transgender children. Oh yeah, and it doesn't stop there.
Psychiatrist Keith Ablow wrote for Fox News dot Com. This
is a dramatic example of the way that our culture
is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity,
(23:54):
homogenizing males and females when the outcome of such psychological
sterilization is not known. And yet again, all of that
meaning imbued into one very tiny, tiny bottle of nail polish. Yeah,
and it's funny to read the comments on on the
(24:15):
post about this whole blow up, because a lot of
people rushed to the defense of gen Allians, basically saying, like,
what doesn't matter. First of all, colors, the colors blue
and paint corresponding with boys and girls. As we've discussed before,
it's a total arbitrary social construct. And why shouldn't a
five year old boy be able to like pink? Well,
(24:37):
and I wonder too if it was so much an
act of her painting the nails that really ruffled feathers,
or if it was pink, like if it had been
say black or navy blue, or you know, some what
was it Marco Bernardini's evolution man nail varnish made for men,
if it would have somehow been better. So, yeah, I
(24:58):
think the combination of a girl all are with a
girl activity just freaked everybody out. And they're like, oh
my god, this five year old doesn't have a choice.
You're just forcing him to be this way. Yeah, just
delt And and psychologist Susan Bartel did defend the behavior.
She said, our kids gender is going to emerge naturally
as part of who they are and has nothing to
do with whether we paint or sorry, whether we put
(25:20):
paint nail polish on them. So, to circle back to
our original question of why do we paint our nails?
The answers that we have come up with are what
we've got. History, we have, the economy, we have apparently
our um, gender concepts, um, we have what else? Luxury flappers? Yeah,
(25:46):
just wanting to grooming, auto paint grooming. They've they've painted
nail polish and manicures as a way to uh, you know,
make yourself look better, appear healthy, fashion, celebrity were ship.
So is the least discinct answer possible? I really the
last time I got my nails painted, I just did
(26:07):
it because my best friend said, paint your nails from
my wedding. Yeah. I keep looking at my nails thinking
I want to go get them done, but I just
don't want to spend the money get that menstrual blood color. Okay,
all right, that's all we have to say about nail polish,
And who knew that there would be so much? I know?
So do you paint your nails? Do you paint them
a specific color for specific reason? Guys out there. Do
(26:29):
you paint your nails? Do you get manicures? Do you
believe that as the economy plummets, more people want to
get their nails painted. Do you think it's a small
luxury or do you just cut back on that tube?
Let us know, Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com is
our email address, and I have a letter here from
(26:50):
Susan and she's writing in response to our episode on
potty politics. She writes, in my workplace, the first two
stalls in every woman's restroom contain female urinals. They look
like a typical male urinal, except there is a lip
jetting out. My female coworkers and I often speculated about
how to use them, as we had never seen anyone
in them, and as they're only six dollars per ussroom
(27:11):
to begin with, it is cut down significantly on the
stalls available. Until one day I happened to be in
the rush room with a colleague from another country. She
went right on in and used the urnal, and I
was fascinated enough to ask how. She laughed and said,
it's much more sanitary because you don't have to sit
down and explain that. You just stand up over the
long porcelain lip and go. I still never tried it,
(27:33):
but I understand now how I could be both sanitary
and likely more space efficient. Thank you, Susan. And here's
another email about our potty politics episode from Victoria. She said,
who knew that the current stall design hasn't been changed
since the mid eighteen hundreds. My uncle sells plumbing supplies,
and one of his favorite stories to tell is about
(27:54):
the automatic flush toilets. Apparently they were first initially tested
in an airport and whom, and we're constantly complaining that
they did not work, flushing way too early. The designers,
all men, kept making adjustments and retesting to no avail. Finally,
one man was talking to his wife about it, and
she of course knew the problem right away once she
explained that many women do not actually sit on the toilet,
(28:16):
but prefer to squat, particularly in public airport restrooms. They
were able to make the adjustments to the sensors, allowing
the automatic flush toilet to take over airports everywhere. Granted
there are still a few that flushed way too early.
I'm happy to say I didn't encounter any on my
last trip across the country. I have totally encountered the free, flushed, terrified.
(28:38):
It's like a reverse of the day, alright. And on
that note, moms Stuff at Discovery dot com is where
you can send your letters. You can also post pictures
of amazing manicures if you would like to do that
crazy nail polished on our Facebook page. Yes, and if
you wear bugles on your fingers, I'd like to see
that too. And you can also follow us on Twitter
(29:00):
at mom Stuff podcast. And there is also a ton
of information on nail upkeep, manicures and handheld let's just
call it that. Over at how Stuff works dot com.
Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff
from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we
(29:21):
explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The
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today on iTunes, brought to you by the reinvented two
thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff Mom never told you?
From house Stuffworks dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline, and today let me describe
(00:22):
what my nails look like to you listeners and to
you because you gotta look really, really close to see
the faint remainders of a manicure that I got a
few weeks ago because I was a maid of honor
and a wedding. I'm very proud of that, and the
bride sent a just you know, a mere suggestion of
(00:47):
the women should the bridesman should get manicures, and so
I still have the remains of bubble bath on my nails.
Sounds lovely. Yeah, it was a very very very faint
pink I see, which, as we will learn later in
the podcast, was a lot like some of the earliest
manicures into Vogue exactly. But I'm not I don't I
(01:10):
typically don't wear nail polish on my fingers. I've actually
started wearing nail polish a little bit more often than
I used to because I don't know why color on
my nails to me, makes my hands look strange. It's distracting.
It can be distracting if you pick a wild color.
But I can't actually get manicures too often, A because
I don't want to spend the money. But be Um,
(01:31):
I have really kind of flimsy nails and nail polish
doesn't quite stay on. We'll just slide right up, just
into a puddle right at my fingertips. Yeah, it's it's
hard to stay on, and so I don't want to
spend I mean, I can see spending the money to
get like one of those man manicures, you know where
they where they do the lotion and they do the
the trimming and the buffing and whatever, the little hand massage,
(01:55):
but they don't actually put the polish on, Like I
would go in for that. But I don't want to
go pay for expend to polish, especially gel nails. It's
a lot to keep up. Um. And even though you
and I are not huge nail manicure fanatics, we wanted
to talk about nail polished today because of two articles
(02:15):
that came out in the New York Times Style section
the first week of April that had really hammered home
the fact nail polish is having quite a moment. It
is never mind the entire long history of nail polish.
This is the era of the fingernail. This is now
(02:36):
for the nail. Nail polish has become, according to the
New York Times article by Ruth law Fair, la the
fastest growing segment of the beauty trade, with sales even
higher than lipstick. And speaking of lipstick, we got to
talk about the economy and women's cosmetics for a minute,
because we've talked about the lipstick index before, which was
(02:58):
this phrase that was is created by Leonard Louder of Estay,
Louder saying that during the Great Depression, lipstick sales went
up because it was still a small luxury that women
were able to purchase. So if you want to see
how the economy is doing, watch cosmetic sales because when
they go up, the stock markets probably going down. Now,
(03:20):
this is a theory that a number of economists have debunked.
But sorry, folks, we've got to introduce you to the
lacquer index, right Uh, the whole lipstick index flash. Lacquer
index idea was spot on in because nail polished sales
were up thirteen point seven per cent, and if you
just look at Revlon alone, their sales were over one
(03:40):
point three billion dollars in And there are some examples
of how nail polished brands are really sparking, just kind
of with some insanity people. Chanel, Yeah, Chanel, there was
this color. I don't I really don't want to try
to bust out of French accent right now. I never
(04:03):
took French, I did, so it's it's a color. It's
like a mushroom gray color. That is a French word
for particular. I'm not gonna say it either. I feel foolish. Particular. Yeah,
that's close, and that's all I got. Just if you
want to pronounce the French word, just say it in
the back of your throat like you're coughing, and that's
what it sounds like. Particular perfect nail polish. Also, that'd
(04:26):
be hard to say if you were wearing it. I
was like, oh, what color is that? You'd have to
bust that out. It's particular. But yeah, there was this
two thousand tin color from Chanel, which was really just
a gray brown, pretty drab color. It was so popular,
um it was called the it color for that year.
That they were waiting lists and bidding wars on eBay,
(04:50):
and NBC New York mentioned um that the previous Chanel
It color, which was jade, much easier to pronounce. It's
not it's not jah day perhaps jade. A bottle of
jade on eBay fetched up to two hundred bucks. I mean,
I don't understand. I do think it's interesting that Chanel
(05:13):
is such a leader. I mean, Chanel is a fancy brand.
Most people can't afford their clothes or their handbags. But
and this is the whole idea behind like simple luxuries
when the economy is bad, Chanel nail polish is very
popular and it's a major trend setter. It's funny because
when they put out a color, they're immediately waiting lists
(05:33):
and people bidding over it on eBay, and then the
copycats start, and then it ends up in magazines, and
then it ends up on your fingers because all of
a sudden, you think, hey, maybe mushroom isn't so ugly,
so there you go, or if you don't like mushroom.
Ruth la Farrett New York Times also reported on a
niche company called Strange Beautiful that apparently introduced a color
(05:56):
meant to mimic menstrual blood. That's right. I mean, aren't
there a million kinds of reds? Couldn't you just pick
one without having to do that? I mean, menstrual blood
is a pretty particular shade of red, apparently, I guess, yeah,
for everybody, it's different. I don't know, I don't know.
I don't know. That is a good question. But anyway, um, yeah,
(06:20):
so it's it's apparently having this fashion moment, and also
the New York Times I'm i gotta say it laughably
followed up with a reactionary piece too, green and yellow
shades that are having a moment right now, thanks two
stars like Katie Perry and Nicki Minash, who were also
(06:40):
with the crazy colors on their nails, and Stephanie Rose
and Bloom went on interviewed a number of men to
get their thoughts on these green and yellow shades, and boy,
howdy do they not like them? Know? And Richard Dorman,
and editor at Esquire, was particular pularly upset. I mean,
(07:02):
he really has it out for these colors. He said,
it's the color of mucus, it's the color of infection,
It's the color of old piano keys. But no, he
doesn't stop. There, doesn't there, he doesn't, He keeps going.
He really yellow must have hurt him as a child somehow.
He says, it's like wearing ugs, it's like wearing ponchos.
(07:23):
It's all of the things that can found the male psyche.
So he's basically pointing out, like women, why do you
do such weird things that don't appeal to men? Why
would you ever do something like that? Although I gotta
say hats off to the guy she quoted, not not
dormant from Esquire, but she quoted another guy comparing the
yellows and greens to old school high see um Ecto cooler,
(07:48):
which was the promotional drink for Ghostbusters. Right, I drank
that in second grade. Yeah, and he knocked it. Now
you can rock it on your fingertips. I know. But
why are we talking about nail posh? Because the thing
is with these trend pieces, they are kind of funny
when you consider the history of nail polish that goes
back as far as oh, five thousand BC. There's nothing
(08:13):
new about us painting our nails. Yeah, we I mean,
we do it for various reasons. But it's been going
on for quite a while. It just seems like maybe
we're wearing more outrageous shades more often. But let's talk
about the history. Yeah. Back in five thousand BC, women
in India were dying their fingertips with hanna, which is
still it's not an unusual practice today either. Um. And
(08:36):
then in three thousand BC, the Chinese painted their nails
with an interesting mixture of egg whites, beeswax, gelatine, arabic gum,
and vegetable die and the color was chosen according to
what the ruling dynasty was, usually red or black, depending
on who was in power. I wonder if there are
d I Y nail polish makers who use that Chinese
(08:57):
recipe out there. Maybe it just seems like they would
chip off or something. Flake off, fall off be heavy
and gross. I don't know. And then in six d BC,
and this is coming from a slideshow off of Refinery nine,
aristocrats during the Child dynasty in China started wearing these
nail guards that look kind of like bugles when you
(09:19):
put them on your fingertips, but but rather than being
made out of corn product of course, um, these nail
guards were made of gold and silver and bejeweled, right,
symbolic of wealth and leisure, because I mean, it's not
like you could do anything with those things on your fingers.
If you've ever tried to type with bugles on your hands,
(09:39):
bugles are also the snack of wealth and bega too exactly.
And going into Egypt, because as we all know, Egyptian
women were trend setters. The upper classes used hannah or
sometimes ox blood to achieve a red hue, and the
red or the color, the higher the class. So in
accord to some of the things we read, Cleopatra preferred
(10:02):
brick red. She liked a deeper color. And then hopping
forward a number of centuries to the four hundreds, I
thought this was really cool. Inca's actually invented nail art
as we know it. Uh, they would paint intricate pictures
of eagles on their nails. That's I guess it passed
the time. Um, and you know, we we didn't have
(10:25):
a whole lot of nail nail art history in the
Dark Ages in Europe. They were just trying not to die,
things to worry about. Um. But women during the Renaissance
began manicuring their nails, although they avoided color. So they
weren't you know, going out and getting blood to dye
their nails with. They were just buffing and shine and
just buffing and shina. And then during the Victorian era,
(10:47):
um translucent manicures were popular. It was it was a
sign of inner purity if your nails were kept buffed
and cleaned and polished yea, And they would use different
oils to keep them all nice and shiny um. And
in nine the first patent for nail polish was granted,
and it was a modification of car paint that had
(11:09):
a syrup light consistency and a faint pink color, which
Kristen was referring to earlier when she talked about her
very faint wedding manicure. It was they weren't going crazy,
they weren't going dark red or anything controversial. I mean,
it was the Victorians people. Yeah, I think about it
kind of like a lip stain rather than lipstick, just
that that very um thin coating of paint. And then
(11:32):
in the nineteen twenties the Flappers come along and really
red things up on the nails. Yeah, they started the
ever popular moon manicure, which I had never heard of,
But I feel like it's It's all over the internet.
You google moon manicure and people are crazy for it.
We'll tell everyone what a moon manicure is. It is
painting sort of in the middle of the nail, over
(11:55):
your little little moon shape, paler skin on your nail
bed and leaving the tips bear. Although there was a
variation that painted the whole nail except for the moon.
It looks pretty cool. And like you said, there are
a ton of vintage advertisements for early nail polish online
that show off that that moon manicure if you want
to check it out. Um and Flappers also popularized the
(12:18):
boulder red nails. But the nineteen thirties is really the
decade of nail polished modern nail polish, because in nineteen
thirty one, Charles Revson gets a job selling cost medics
for Elka, which was America's first opaque lacquer brand. And
this is coming from a history article off of the
(12:38):
Daily dot com um And so he starts selling this
nail lacquer and then he teams up with his brother
Joseph and Charles Lackman and starts the Revlon Nail Enamel Company.
And then in spring nineteen thirty four, Revlon cream colored
polish takes off. But this is a revolution nary product
(13:00):
because rather than just being more of a stain, it's
actually that hard enamel cover that we think of today. Right,
And French makeup artist Michelle Minard is credited with the idea,
supposedly inspired by auto paint, which makes sense. And in
the nineteen twenties um colors, the color spectrum of nail
polish really opened up because of the invention of synthetic
(13:22):
pigments and solvents. And also on a side note, because
of that, there was a trend in the nineteen twenties
in France where green nails it was modeled off of
highly toxic green fuselage paint for aircraft, suffering for fashion,
suffering for fashion. But because we have those synthetic pigments
and solvents, we have more colors available. And then Revson
(13:44):
and his friends come along and create the uh or
recreate I guess the formula for nail polish. Not everybody
was so happy with all of these trends in nail polish, however,
Dr Carl Manager in four told the American Psychiatric Assists Actian,
you know those darn flappers. He said that bobbed hair
and painted nails were self mutilations as serious as anorexia
(14:07):
and self cutting, so he thought that doing anything unnatural
was just horrible. Well, it was like how the you know,
excessive use of cosmetics, even just putting on red lipstick
started out being associated with prostitutes and actresses who were
not held in a very high regard until the rise
of Hollywood and the whole movie culture, which is then
(14:29):
trickled down through the flappers. So red nails, wanton woman,
well manager was in the minority because that same year,
dentist Maxwell Lap created the first set of fake nails
for clients who bit their nails, So that's where we
got that from. And then in nine another dentist, Frederick Slack,
(14:52):
accidentally invented the acrylic sculpting nail extension when he was
trying to mend a broken nail with acrylic. Thank you dentists,
they were all of this nail technology, and really they
weren't busy enough. Uh. In the nineteen sixties, pastel shades
started to gain popularity, and in the seventies that's when
those long fake nails really became popular and took off.
(15:13):
And beauty salon started opening at a higher rate to
answer demand, and in nineteen seventy six, something that is
not actually French was invented. What happened Jeff Paint creates
the French manicure and he is the one who founded
Orally in nineteen seventy five. And then in the nineteen
eighties we've got, you know, the wild and wacky neon
(15:34):
day glo kind of colors. And then in the nineteen nineties,
um a lot of red and nude comes back in
the style, along with got to talk about goth and
grunge and black nails, but especially chipped black nails. But
you didn't need nail polish for that. You could just
get a sharpie color in your nails a little bit.
(15:55):
You're done with it right what it was in that Chanel,
speaking of their trendiness, came out with Vamp, which was
a really dark red color, and that I feel like
just created pandemonium. And then in the two thousands we
have the quote unprecedented level of interest in nail art
where we start seeing more commonly nail adhesive gel polished
(16:15):
at last for a really long time, nail art, you know,
you can get cheetah print on your nails. If you
want fishnet print, you can get your your honey's face
printed on your nails, right, or your cat or whoever. Um.
I actually I've tried gel polished before and it absolutely
decimated my nails. Yeah, the first time I ever did it,
(16:38):
I was like, oh my gosh, this is what fingernails
can look like with the manicure. And you know, they're
called the two week manicures because they last so much
longer than regular nail polished. But the stuff that I
had to soak my hands in to get the stuff
off was I don't know, it had to be completely
and awfully toxic because my fingers just like disgusting afterwards.
(16:58):
So maybe that's not for me. I would of caution, um,
and we have I should mention that. Um. We did
a podcast now probably a couple of years ago on
nail salons and all of those chemicals that go into
manicures that you might want to watch out for that
can also cause some health problems for nail salon workers.
(17:20):
So we've established that nail polish has quite an extensive history.
It's nothing new that we're doing, but one thing that
seems pretty consistent, especially when you get down to the
more granular level of what's happening and all of the
fads in the twentieth century, it is very clearly something
that becomes associated with beauty and women. While plenty of
(17:45):
men might go get manicures, the kind where they just
clean up your nails, still for a guy to have
on nail polish is a gender bending kind of activity
that we first really saw in pop culture in the
nineteen seventies with Freddie Mercury and David Bowie sporting blackmail
polish and other colors. Right um A Laura talks about
(18:09):
Evolution Man, which is a brand of four men only
nail polish, and founder Marco Burrodini had fun painting his
own nails in an effort to stop himself from biting them,
and he said that I love strong colors that make
a bold statement with a stark contrast on the skin.
And he talks about whether men get the perfect clean
(18:29):
manicure suggesting success or power, or a bold color to
show they're not confined to society's rules. It's a way
to express who they are, to which I say, really, yeah,
I mean, do you really need nail polish? For a man,
because isn't the mere fact of creating that kind of
product for a man, because you have similar products now
(18:50):
with makeup to like concealer for men, all these four
men that I mean, I get it, marketing and all
of that, but it's just can't, can't, can't any I
just go grab a thing of Chanel particular because I'm
not going to say it in French. Again. Well, yeah,
there's that, but there's also I mean, is this a
(19:10):
realistic trend? I mean maybe for rock stars or what,
I don't know whatever, but is your average banker or
lawyer going to go pick up a bottle of man
polish and painted fingernails? Well, and there is still the
thing too of if you are a woman in a
nine to five job, if you're wearing a suit to work,
I mean, how often do you see those kind of
(19:32):
women with super outrageous manicures. There is still kind of
a message that it sends if you're not sort of
sticking to the more standard kinds of manicures. And again
it's like, are we are we putting too much into um?
This nail polished at New York Times also had UM
an entire room for debate section interviewing I think six
(19:56):
or eight people on what this means that we're painting
our nails with front colors, and it's everything from oh,
well we've just always done this, to the economy to
gender to um what else? Just oh luxury and all
of that and expressing yourself. Well, you mentioned women, you know,
not wearing wild colors in the office. Jennifer Scanlon as
(20:16):
part of this big New York Times Peace. She's a
professor of gender and women studies at bowd Wine. She
says that the emergence of crazy nail colors as a
mainstream trend is an issue of privilege and deprivation. And
the whole privilege issue is that women must be feeling
more at home in a greater variety of settings so
they can enter professional settings more comfortably on their own terms,
i e. Wearing green nail polish to work well. And
(20:40):
if she brings up deprivation too, even though she doesn't
pointed out in the column she wrote. Jennas Sours from
Jezebel also contributed to the Room for debate on nail polish,
and she brings up the fact that nail salons have
proliferated things to cheap labor and lax regulatory oversight of
the spot in industry, and so we're really relying on
(21:02):
a lot of I mean, this is more going and
getting your nails and not just buying nail polish and
doing it yourself, obviously, but there is still that side
of it too, where it is fueled by a lot
of immigrant labor and exposure to dangerous chemicals on a
daily basis, which all of this has contributed to lower
prices because I mean, have you ever seen a shopping
mall without a nail salon. I feel like there's one
(21:24):
in every single corner I could pick in my neighborhood.
I could pick from like three to go to and
within walking distance. And so this, you know, lower prices,
more people being able to get manicures. Although you know,
a lot of these pieces that we read kept connecting
a bad economy with little luxuries like manicures. But if
I'm not doing so well financially, I'm going to cut
(21:44):
back on manicures too, because I mean, if I wanted,
I could go buy a bottle of nail polish at
the drug store and paint my own freaking nails. If
I wanted to. But that's what some of these articles
we're talking about, that the nail polish and beauty industry
create eats trends to get people to go back to
the store and buy another bottle of nail polish by
(22:06):
that crackle polish that does weird things on your fingernails,
get jail nails. You know. There's even one nail polish
you talked about that has iron filaments so that when
you hold a magnet over your nails, it makes an
image like it pulls up the filaments to create some
kind of image. That just seems like it takes so
much time and then you have to carry out a
magnet everything to show people the images on your nail.
(22:28):
I think it just doesn't when it's wet. But um.
One one huge debate that came up about nail polish
that perhaps to me was the peak of absurdity was
in April of two thousand eleven, when the J Crew
creative director Jen Alliance was featured in one of the
j cru catalogs painting her young son's toenails pink, and
(22:50):
there was a caption with it it says, Lucky for me,
I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is
pink toenail painting is so much more fun in neon
and ins entity ensued. Firestorms freaked out, saying, you're painting.
First of all, you're painting and boys tonails, and that
is an activity reserve for girls. Also, you're painting it pink.
(23:10):
You are screwing up this child's personal gender schema. Jenna Lions. Yeah,
she is clearly ruining her son's mental state for the
rest of his life, because obviously he will remember this
forever and it will stick with him and other boys
will beat him up and this will be the worst
thing that has ever happened to him. It was really
portrayed that way. Yeah. Aaron Brown for the Culture and
(23:31):
Media Institute said that the magazine spread features blatant propaganda
celebrating transgender children. Oh yeah, and it doesn't stop there.
Psychiatrist Keith Ablow wrote for Fox News dot Com. This
is a dramatic example of the way that our culture
is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity,
(23:54):
homogenizing males and females when the outcome of such psychological
sterilization is not known. And yet again, all of that
meaning imbued into one very tiny, tiny bottle of nail polish. Yeah,
and it's funny to read the comments on on the
(24:15):
post about this whole blow up, because a lot of
people rushed to the defense of gen Allians, basically saying, like,
what doesn't matter. First of all, colors, the colors blue
and paint corresponding with boys and girls. As we've discussed before,
it's a total arbitrary social construct. And why shouldn't a
five year old boy be able to like pink? Well,
(24:37):
and I wonder too if it was so much an
act of her painting the nails that really ruffled feathers,
or if it was pink, like if it had been
say black or navy blue, or you know, some what
was it Marco Bernardini's evolution man nail varnish made for men,
if it would have somehow been better. So, yeah, I
(24:58):
think the combination of a girl all are with a
girl activity just freaked everybody out. And they're like, oh
my god, this five year old doesn't have a choice.
You're just forcing him to be this way. Yeah, just
delt And and psychologist Susan Bartel did defend the behavior.
She said, our kids gender is going to emerge naturally
as part of who they are and has nothing to
do with whether we paint or sorry, whether we put
(25:20):
paint nail polish on them. So, to circle back to
our original question of why do we paint our nails?
The answers that we have come up with are what
we've got. History, we have, the economy, we have apparently
our um, gender concepts, um, we have what else? Luxury flappers? Yeah,
(25:46):
just wanting to grooming, auto paint grooming. They've they've painted
nail polish and manicures as a way to uh, you know,
make yourself look better, appear healthy, fashion, celebrity were ship.
So is the least discinct answer possible? I really the
last time I got my nails painted, I just did
(26:07):
it because my best friend said, paint your nails from
my wedding. Yeah. I keep looking at my nails thinking
I want to go get them done, but I just
don't want to spend the money get that menstrual blood color. Okay,
all right, that's all we have to say about nail polish,
And who knew that there would be so much? I know?
So do you paint your nails? Do you paint them
a specific color for specific reason? Guys out there. Do
(26:29):
you paint your nails? Do you get manicures? Do you
believe that as the economy plummets, more people want to
get their nails painted. Do you think it's a small
luxury or do you just cut back on that tube?
Let us know, Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com is
our email address, and I have a letter here from
(26:50):
Susan and she's writing in response to our episode on
potty politics. She writes, in my workplace, the first two
stalls in every woman's restroom contain female urinals. They look
like a typical male urinal, except there is a lip
jetting out. My female coworkers and I often speculated about
how to use them, as we had never seen anyone
in them, and as they're only six dollars per ussroom
(27:11):
to begin with, it is cut down significantly on the
stalls available. Until one day I happened to be in
the rush room with a colleague from another country. She
went right on in and used the urnal, and I
was fascinated enough to ask how. She laughed and said,
it's much more sanitary because you don't have to sit
down and explain that. You just stand up over the
long porcelain lip and go. I still never tried it,
(27:33):
but I understand now how I could be both sanitary
and likely more space efficient. Thank you, Susan. And here's
another email about our potty politics episode from Victoria. She said,
who knew that the current stall design hasn't been changed
since the mid eighteen hundreds. My uncle sells plumbing supplies,
and one of his favorite stories to tell is about
(27:54):
the automatic flush toilets. Apparently they were first initially tested
in an airport and whom, and we're constantly complaining that
they did not work, flushing way too early. The designers,
all men, kept making adjustments and retesting to no avail. Finally,
one man was talking to his wife about it, and
she of course knew the problem right away once she
explained that many women do not actually sit on the toilet,
(28:16):
but prefer to squat, particularly in public airport restrooms. They
were able to make the adjustments to the sensors, allowing
the automatic flush toilet to take over airports everywhere. Granted
there are still a few that flushed way too early.
I'm happy to say I didn't encounter any on my
last trip across the country. I have totally encountered the free, flushed, terrified.
(28:38):
It's like a reverse of the day, alright. And on
that note, moms Stuff at Discovery dot com is where
you can send your letters. You can also post pictures
of amazing manicures if you would like to do that
crazy nail polished on our Facebook page. Yes, and if
you wear bugles on your fingers, I'd like to see
that too. And you can also follow us on Twitter
(29:00):
at mom Stuff podcast. And there is also a ton
of information on nail upkeep, manicures and handheld let's just
call it that. Over at how Stuff works dot com.
Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff
from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we
(29:21):
explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The
house Stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it
today on iTunes, brought to you by the reinvented two
thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
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