history of nailpolish

The idea of colouring your nails is an old one; the ancient Egyptians stained their nails with henna, and the ancient Japanese and Chinese also stained the nails with various herbal extracts.
Modern nail varnish was invented in the 1920's. Charles Revson formed the Charles Revson company with his brother Martin Revson and Charles Lachman, a chemist.
They employed a French make-up artist, Michelle Renard, who wondered if the new technology used for painting cars could be used to make an enamel for the nails. The revolution in thinking was to abandon staining the actual nail, but instead to paint a hard-wearing enamel on top of it. She managed to create a modern lacquer made of the same nitrocellulose disolved in solvent, that was used on cars (except not the same strength).
Charles Revson and his colleagues thought the idea had market potential and set up a factory to manufacture it. Because their nail varnish was created from hard-wearing chemicals rather than from herbs, it had the advantage that it was easy to store and keep - as long as the bottle was sealed and the solvent could not evaporate, the varnish was as good as the day it was created.
The Charles Revson company became Revlon (they added the L in the middle of the name for the other co-founder Lachman). The first Revlon nail polish went on sale in 1932. It initially sold in hair and beauty salons, and was then marketed in department stores and drug stores.
It was Hollywood that made the new nail polish big. Colour movies had just arrived, and audiences could see their favourite actresses wearing the exotic reds and mauves of the Revlon company, and they searched out the product in the shops. It helped that it was relatively cheap as far as make-up goes. Painting your nails and buying the matching lipstick gave you a bit of Hollywood glamour even if your clothes were cheap. Other cosmetic houses soon followed and added nail polish to their ranges too.
The formula for nail polish remains similar to the one invented by Michelle Menard some 80 years ago. It's been amended a bit to make it longer lasting and to make it dry quicker, but essentially it's the same nitro-cellulose suspended in solvent.
The innovations have been mainly in the field of colour. When nail polish first came out, the fashion was to match your nails and lipstick, and because lipstick tended to be red or pink, nails were red or pink too. In the 1960's clear nail polish came in, to give a natural look that complemented the nude lipsticks that were in fashion then. But it wasn't till the late 1990's that cosmetic companies abandoned the idea of matching lips and nails and started producing blue nail polish, green nail polish and a host of other exotic colours - gold, silver, black, neon and so on. Just like the car enamels that inspired nail polish, you can have any colour you want.