Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren vogel Bomb here with a look into the history
Speaker 1: of an everyday item, nail polish. It's actually been an
Speaker 1: everyday item for folks going back at least five thousand years.
Speaker 1: The very first people to apply color to their nails
Speaker 1: were likely in India during the Bronze Age, and they
Speaker 1: probably used hanna to do it. The use of hannah
Speaker 1: as a dye for body art was very common, so
Speaker 1: extending the designs and color onto the nails was a
Speaker 1: natural next step. The Chinese took the nail game up
Speaker 1: level sometime around three thousand b C. They created a
Speaker 1: sort of nail varnish using a mixture of egg whites, beeswax, gelatine,
Speaker 1: gum arabic which is a sap from the acacia tree,
Speaker 1: and alum, a compound frequently used in dying to help
Speaker 1: colors stick. These varnishes were then colored with flower petals
Speaker 1: or gold or silver dust. They further personalized the looks
Speaker 1: with artificial nails made of silver and gold covered with
Speaker 1: jewels or clauswine as well. These elaborately design and colored
Speaker 1: nails were exclusively reserved for royal classes only around the
Speaker 1: same time the Babylonians were getting into the nail game,
Speaker 1: but it was the warriors who were wearing color. The
Speaker 1: men pigmented their nails with coal, which is finely powdered
Speaker 1: sulfide before going into battle again. Even among these soldiers,
Speaker 1: class mattered. Higher class warriors had their nails colored with
Speaker 1: black coal, while lower class fighters used green coal. Anna
Speaker 1: has also been found painted on Egyptian mummies, including their nails.
Speaker 1: Nail color signified class in Egypt too. The redder ones
Speaker 1: nails in ancient Egypt, the more power of that person had.
Speaker 1: The Queen Nefertiti, the stepmother of King Tuton, common wore
Speaker 1: dark red nails, a color rumored to have blood in it.
Speaker 1: Cleopatra is said to have painted her nails from the
Speaker 1: juice of the hennaplant, which created a deep and rusty color.
Speaker 1: Women of lower rank were only allowed to wear pastel colors.
Speaker 1: Colored nails were popular in Europe by the Renaissance arrow
Speaker 1: when trade with countries in Asia opened up, coloring and
Speaker 1: the jeweling nails hit another high and eighteenth century French Wars,
Speaker 1: where outlandish fashion trends were the rage. By the Victorian era,
Speaker 1: women were creating color and shine with tinted oils. Women
Speaker 1: were also using tinted powders and creams on their nails
Speaker 1: to give them color and shine. That apply the mild
Speaker 1: abrasive and buffett for a shiny look, but it took
Speaker 1: time to apply the powder, cream, polish and buff each nail.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixteen, q Texts changed that when it introduced
Speaker 1: its first clear nail lacquer. Painting a layer of shine
Speaker 1: on fingernails became much easier than all that buffing. It
Speaker 1: wasn't until the early twentieth century that polished as we
Speaker 1: know it came into existence, though, and we have the
Speaker 1: automobile industry to think. In the nineteen twenties, automotive paint
Speaker 1: was invented, and not long after French manicurist Michelle Minard
Speaker 1: adapted the formula to create opaque nail polish. Her employer,
Speaker 1: Charles Revson knew a good thing when he saw it,
Speaker 1: so he and his brother Joseph launched a new company, Revlon,
Speaker 1: with the first colored nail enamel appearing in nineteen thirty two.
Speaker 1: Manicures were far from being the exclusive terror tory of
Speaker 1: the upper classes at this point. A bottle of Q
Speaker 1: text nail polished cost thirty five cents in nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: four and affordable luxury in a time of tight purse strings.
Speaker 1: When America entered World War Two and women joined the
Speaker 1: workforce in huge numbers, manicures changed accordingly, along nails were
Speaker 1: not going to last doing shift work at the factory.
Speaker 1: Even the New York Times ran remedies for motor mechanic hands.
Speaker 1: Rather than trying to keep up brightly painted nails, women
Speaker 1: working manual jobs turned back to clear polish or even
Speaker 1: buffing with cream polish. After Menard invented colored nail lacquer,
Speaker 1: women were having their nails coated from base to tip
Speaker 1: with solid colors. But it didn't take long before the
Speaker 1: French manicure became a mark of sophistication. Rather than using
Speaker 1: two colors as we often do today, women would leave
Speaker 1: the moon at the base of the nail and the
Speaker 1: tip completely and very carefully unpainted. Black nail varnish was
Speaker 1: introduced in the nineteen thirties, though there's no evidence of
Speaker 1: any soldiers getting their nails done allah the Babylonians. At
Speaker 1: the same time, in England, women were having land escapes
Speaker 1: painted onto their nails, a level of detail not attempted
Speaker 1: since the Chinese Clausmene nails of nearly five thousand years before.
Speaker 1: You can now find nail polished nearly everywhere, in nearly
Speaker 1: every color, and for as little as a few dollars
Speaker 1: a bottle. But the echoes of the upper class Chinese, Babylonian,
Speaker 1: Egyptian and French still linger in products like As It
Speaker 1: Tours Black and Diamond Polish. It contains two hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty seven carrots of black diamonds and costs a cool
Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a bottle. Today's episode
Speaker 1: was written by Kristen hall Geisler and produced by Tyler Clang.
Speaker 1: For more on this and lots of other colorful topics,
Speaker 1: visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.