StoryGnat #24: Nailing it
Good morning, StoryGnatter!
Today, I’m showing my age. I was an ‘80s baby. There, I said it.
And that means, I was a ‘90s teen (what a time to be alive). I was also a teen who came out in a rash at 90% of the makeup or skincare on offer, meaning that one of the few cosmetics realistically within my grasp (and pocket money budget) was nail polish.
I’m not someone who has their nails painted all the time - far from it. But it is a little ritual that lifts my mood and slows me down (trying to do anything with still-tacky nails is a nightmare). I’ve never graduated to any of the newer nail art or gels or acrylics… just me and my trusty little bottles of colour, painting them imperfectly but joyfully. And that works just fine for me.
But to get back to the point – where did all this nail paintery start? Who decided that painting the tips of our fingers different colours was fabulous idea? And how did the first formulations come to market?
Yes, you guessed it. Today, we’re looking at…
The story of nail polish
It turns out that people have coloured their nails since ancient times – think Babylonia, China, Egypt and more - rubbing powders or oils into their nails to leave a colour stain.
The story of nail polish as we’d recognise it today starts in the late 1800s when the manicure became a thing and the first nail salons opened - first in Paris and then New York.
Move on a couple of decades and Cutex launched a cuticle remover, some early nail polishes and tints.
But the brighter, more pigmented type of polish familiar to us today wouldn’t appear until the 1930s and Revlon. It was all down to an ingredient called nitrocellulose, which became available in the US after they seized chemical patents from the Germans during World War One. Nitrocellulose was initially used in car paint, before inspiring the first pigmented liquid nail polish in the early 1930s. And it’s still a core ingredient in many a bottle of the good stuff to this day.
There’s way more to the story than this, but it’s the car paint bit that always sticks in my mind. Explore the detail for yourself:
That’s for this week. As always, I love to know which of these you enjoy and which you skip, so let me know? And next week, as always, it’ll be something completely different…
Meg