Nail Care.

[Snowy Owl]

No, I`m not in the wrong category! Having just cut and filed my nails using clippers and an emery board, I wondered how people in the past managed their nails before such items were in existence.

Any answers, or pointers to where I might find them, gratefully received.

[dot.hawkes]

Found this;
1320-1550: No one knows the favourite nail colour of Cleopatra or Nefertiti, but it just might have been gold. Archaeologists have unearthed Egyptian mummies with golden fingernails, and historical records show that wealthy women in ancient Egypt did indeed paint their nails. It is believed they used natural products from plants or animals for their polish.

1368-1644: Coloured polish in a variety of forms graced the fingernails of women around the world since the early ages. During China�s Ming Dynasty, women made nail lacquer from a combination of beeswax, egg whites, gelatin, vegetable dyes and Arabic gum.

Early formulators used castor oil to make the polish more flexible while natural resins were included to soften the nail and improve drying time.

In the late 19th century, women in the US used a solution of nitrocellulose in a mixture of alcohol and ether. When large stocks of nitrocellulose, used in explosives during the First World War, were available in the early 1920s, this technology gained further development for nail polish. The car industry soon adopted nitrocellulose lacquer for automobile paint because of its
glossy, fast-drying qualities.

1920�s: At this time, the first nail lacquer was clear and thin. Later, rhodamines (red or pink chemical dyes) were added to give colour to the clear products.

Around 1925, resourceful manufacturers took advantage of the plentiful celluloid film scraps discarded by the thriving movie industry to make nail polish; they cleaned the scraps and added sandarac gum resin, castor oil, acetone, denatured alcohol and phloxine for colour. Acetates were added 10 years later, and basic nail polish formulas remained almost unchanged for many decades to follow.

[jno]

bit them? Or in the case of Nefertiti, got a slave to bite them.