It is said that the practice of women coloring their fingernails originated, like so many other things, in China, about three thousand years B.C. However, at about the same time Egyptian women were also doing the same thing.
But why do women paint their fingernails? Well, looked at from the Chinese historical viewpoint it may be because a woman’s fingernails were one of the few parts of the body which could be seen – at that time, apart from the face and hands, everything was covered up. As a result, the hands, especially the fingers, developed an attractiveness and charm of their own and were expected to be nicely formed, soft and white. And so to make her fingers even more attractive a woman would find a way to paint them.
The early Chinese would use balsam flowers which were ground into a mash and alum added. To obtain the shade required this mash was then applied to the nails, perhaps every day for four or five days, with bright red being the most popular color. The Egyptians used henna to stain their nails, with again red being favored as it was seen as a symbol of the highest social class.
Information is scarce over how women treated their fingernails over the following millennia, but 17th century pictures show that women preferred polished nails to colored nails. Apparently every effort was made to give nails a smooth and shiny look, and this was done with the application of creams and powders followed by buffing and polishing with chamois.
It wasn’t until the early 1920s that colored nail polish as we know it today was introduced. This offered women a huge array of colors to choose from and at affordable prices. So nowadays painted fingernails are so fashionable that it’s unfashionable not to have them.
Time has passed but fashion hasn’t changed much, for even after five thousand years, women still want what the early Chinese wanted – improved attractiveness through nicely shaped and soft hands, with long smooth fingers tapering into elegant painted fingernails.