What's the History of Nail Polish?

The nail polishes popular today owe their existence to the automotive industry, but the history of nail colors and varnishes goes back millennia. Learn the history of nail polish in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren vogel Bomb here with a look into the history
of an everyday item, nail polish. It's actually been an
everyday item for folks going back at least five thousand years.
The very first people to apply color to their nails
were likely in India during the Bronze Age, and they
probably used hanna to do it. The use of hannah

(00:24):
as a dye for body art was very common, so
extending the designs and color onto the nails was a
natural next step. The Chinese took the nail game up
level sometime around three thousand b C. They created a
sort of nail varnish using a mixture of egg whites, beeswax, gelatine,
gum arabic which is a sap from the acacia tree,
and alum, a compound frequently used in dying to help

(00:46):
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 clauswine as well. These elaborately design and colored
nails were exclusively reserved for royal classes only around the
same time the Babylonians were getting into the nail game,

(01:07):
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. Anna
has also been found painted on Egyptian mummies, including their nails.

(01:28):
Nail color signified class in Egypt too. The redder ones
nails in ancient Egypt, the more power of that person had.
The Queen Nefertiti, the stepmother of King Tuton, 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.

(01:51):
Colored nails were popular in Europe by the Renaissance arrow
when trade with countries in Asia opened up, coloring and
the jeweling nails hit another high and eighteenth century French Wars,
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

(02:13):
abrasive and buffett for a shiny look, but it took
time to apply the powder, cream, polish and buff each nail.
In nineteen sixteen, q Texts 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 polished as we
know it came into existence, though, and we have the

(02:35):
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.

(02:57):
Manicures were far from being the exclusive terror tory of
the upper classes at this point. A bottle of Q
text nail polished cost thirty five cents in nineteen thirty
four and affordable luxury in a time of tight purse strings.
When America entered World War Two and women joined the
workforce in huge numbers, manicures changed accordingly, along nails were
not going to last doing shift work at the factory.

(03:18):
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 Menard invented colored nail lacquer,
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

(03:41):
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 allah the Babylonians. At
the same time, in England, women were having land escapes
painted onto their nails, a level of detail not attempted

(04:03):
since the Chinese Clausmene nails of nearly five thousand years before.
You can now find nail polished 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 As It
Tours Black and Diamond Polish. It contains two hundred and

(04:23):
sixty seven carrots of black diamonds and costs a cool
two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a bottle. Today's episode
was written by Kristen hall Geisler and produced by Tyler Clang.
For more on this and lots of other colorful topics,
visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.