Royalty for Pocket Change

Marc: Renee, my wife and the youngest have a place they go to get their nails done. It's a kind of a local salon. You know, it's like Cheers, right? The place where everyone knows everyone.

Renee: They all are. Yeah, that's a thing.

Marc: The ladies are all, they know everybody. You know that. So this is a shout out to Lily's here in Maidstone. That's the name of the salon. And last week I drop off the youngest to get her nails redone. And this is like, I'll happily pay for the nails if they won't be, you know, picking at their fingers. But she was getting her nails done in a natural kind of coat, you know, plain for school. So it's not polished or whatever. And they put a gloss on it. And one of her teachers was like, you know, that's kind of posh. And it was like, I know exactly. You couldn't tell. It was like translucent. You know, it was like almost like just a clear coat.

Renee: It was clear nail polish. How is that posh?

Marc: Yeah. And so now she gets it. It's like even more. I think it's more posh because it's like they work on it more. And they basically protect the nail and then matte coat it so it looks like a natural nail. And it's all, it looks really finished and nice. So anyway, so that's why she's getting her nails done. So I pick them up. They're kind of closing up for the evening and cleaning up and stuff. And it comes out that I host a podcast. I think Tara mentioned it or something. And then they're asking the youngest about it because she was on an episode about the flushing toilet. So I just see her, you know, as she's talking to the ladies, she's talking about, you know, how she was on the podcast and she was having fun and, you know, all that. And how brilliant she was.

Renee: Yeah.

Marc: She was great.

Renee: Yeah.

Marc: And they just wanted to know everything about the podcast, what it's about, you know, how many episodes, what's the weirdest one. And they were just like, question, question, question, question. And I'm standing there answering, but I'm also kind of looking around the shop and because I like paint. And there's all sorts of really cool stuff in there Real cool tech Because nail adornment Has this weird crossover Into one of my other hobbies Scale modeling, Glass files, tweezers, water slide decals, UV resin. I've got the resin right here on my desk. Lacquer paints, acetone, acetone. It's all familiar territory. And I really enjoy the tech behind all of it.

Renee: So back in the day, there was none of that tech, right? You would go in and they would use like crazy, terrible smelling acetone to soak your nails in it so that your nail polish would come off, right? And then if you got nail tips, then you were dealing with the glue and the acrylic and all that other stuff, right? And then it was just, depending on how good your nail tech was, like if you had a good nail tech, you'd spend maybe seven or eight minutes per hand filing. If you had a really crappy one, it'd be like a half an hour later, we're on nail three, right? And so I have no patience for that. Plus, my nails are oily. So no matter what I did to them, whether they were acrylics, whether they were whatever, it would they would just it would just pop off. Right. And so for me, going to know, I have I have it on now,

Marc: But for me, plus I.

Renee: I would chew my nails down to nubs, right? And in the end, having done so much work in racks and servers and data centers, it was probably a necessity in the end. You can't have long fingernails and do any of that. But they're growing in now because I drink way too much milk with vitamins in it. And so now my nails are actually really growing. And so I'm kind of happy about it. But wait, so the whole room's asking about the podcast. And you're off in some corner working out what's in the bottles. Is this what you're doing?

Marc: Yeah, pretty much. And there's a giant, like, there's a giant bottle of acetone on the counter, right? And it's, you know, it's hard not to notice. You walk in, you smell the smell, you see the stuff. There it is.

Renee: I'll have you also know that the clear nail polish that they put over when they're done, the top coat, that's in a bottle that's as big as a softball because they use so much of it. And it comes with a really long brush in it. So, yeah, of course you did because that's what you do.

Marc: I know. That's me. So, but all of that stuff, you know, like our modeling supplies, I got the paints, all my paints over here on my rack and everything. It's a lot of it's the same stuff. Nail polish and the paint on my models, they come from the same place, the same sorts of solvents, same kind of film. Film is when it hardens and dries, you know, the same airbrush, like I got my stack of airbrushes over here. And I just didn't say it out loud in a room full of people, you know, who do it for a living though.

Renee: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Nostalgic Nerds podcast, where we talk about the history of technology, what it teaches us about the present and the future. Tonight, we're talking about nail polish, which sounds like a beauty topic, but it's not. I promise you it's not. Like, it kind of is, but it's a chemistry. It's a chemistry topic. It's a manufacturing topic and a 5,000-year-old argument about class that happens to live in a 15-milliliter bottle.

Marc: Yeah. This episode's probably not going to be like, you know, massive infrastructure like we like to talk about normally. You know, it's not going to be like that.

Renee: Give everybody a break on the massive infrastructure talk.

Marc: This is the most important appliance. This is the most important invention. This is the most critical, you know, nail polish. It's not double-entry bookkeeping here.

Renee: It's not. Or the sewing machine.

Marc: Or the sewing machine, yeah. Most people never think about what's in the bottle itself. You know, it's a coating... But the same family as car paint and the paint on a scale model, they're the same. They're related. And that's what we're going to explore in this episode. All right. So one thing first, we're talking about the kind of the classic bottle, the brush on lacquer. Gel is a different animal. We'll get to the gel. Interesting language thing. Here in the UK, they say nail varnish, not polish. In some places in the world they use the word nail enamels because it's got this like shiny you know looks like shiny hard like cloisonne enamel so, you know apologies if i use the wrong term to folks but i'll probably say polish most of the time, so so what's actually in it right at the heart there's one ingredient that does most of the work in nail polish and this is the coolest part, I think. All right. Nitrocellulose. That's the film part there. So when the liquid dries, the hard, glossy skin left on the nail is the nitrocellulose. And this is, all right. So, all right. Nitrocellulose is cotton treated with acid. In another life, it's called gun cotton. It's mildly explosive in bulk. So, yeah, explosives from World War I here made this possible. The same material made early photographic film in the first plastics as well. So maybe this is a big infrastructure thing. I don't know. But you're painting your nails with a tamed explosive.

Renee: I mean, you're talking about this like you love it. Like, this is really making you happy.

Marc: It does. It does, right? So on its own, the film would crack the first time you bent your finger, you know, hit your nails or whatever. So you soften it up with something. And, you know, usually that's not, you know, usually, but classically in, you know, the olden days and even today, it's camphor. Then a little resin, so it grips the nails and it shines. There's a solvent to keep it liquid in the bottle. Color, right, that's the pigment. And a thickener so the color doesn't sink to the bottom. That's the whole recipe. You've got film, you know, the nitrocellulose. You've got a softener of some sort, something to have a grip, solvent, color, and thickener.

Renee: And the thickener is why we all shake that bottle and why it has that little, you know, ball bearing in it. Because most nail polishes has the ball bearing in it to make it all, you know, kind of mix up.

Marc: Agitate it, yeah. And the thickener is letting, you know, go when you shake and, you know, stiffening it again when it sits around. So same trick as no drip paint, right? Or ketchup even. There's a, you know, a stiffener in it. And the unmistakable smell when the bottle opens is the solvent itself just leaving its off-gassing. It's in the nail polish itself. It's not usually acetone, but it's a, you know, it's a cousin of acetone, you know, nail polish remover. And you just remember that smell because it's, you know, it's the bridge for my modeling workbench, Renee. Yeah.

Renee: So I just want to let you know, when you have nail polish and you have a color you really like and it's too thick because it's just it's been exposed too many times to. Yeah. You know what you do? You get an eyedropper and you throw some acetone in it. That's right. It's right back. Before any of that chemistry existed, people were coloring their nails and almost everywhere it shows up. It's about rank, not beauty first, rank, who you are, what you're allowed to wear and what happens to you if you wear the wrong color. So, we start in China. Around 3,000 years ago, royalty soaked their nails for hours in a mix of beeswax, eggs, whites, gelatin, and crushed flower petals. Gold and silver were the royal shades, and then later red and black. And it was enforced. There are accounts of commoners being punished, in some tellings being put to death, for wearing a color above their station. By the Ming Dynasty, the elite grew their nails absurdly long and capped them in jewel gold guards because that was the entire message. Like today, that's what I'll say, like today, long nails meant you did no work with your hands. Because if you did, if you did, if you did dishes all day long or you worked out in a garden, you wouldn't have long nails for sure. Because you, yeah, because you did work with your hands.

Marc: So the status, you know, that status display you physically can't fake, right? You can't have nails like that and then dig a field.

Renee: Right. So nails are the proof. Yeah. Yeah. Or type.

Marc: Type massive analyst reports.

Renee: Although I'll tell you this, like typing does help them grow. So it's a catch 22 because they get exercise, right? Just weird as that sounds. The nails improved. Some logic ran, same logic ran through Egypt, just different material. There it was henna, the plant dye, staining the nail, a deep rust red and the depth of the red mapped to your power. The strongest shade sat at the top. Everyone below wore a pale one. Cleopatra's red was effectively off-limits to ordinary people. For most of human history, a colored nail was not a way to express yourself. It was a way of announcing exactly where you sat and warning everyone else not to climb. Oh, it's the Birkin bag of the ancient world.

Marc: Ha ha ha!

Renee: And what gets me right and what gets me is how many cultures landed on this on their own right china egypt india the incas no contact i mean these people didn't know each other different eyes same instinct put the rank on the hands where everyone can read it at a glance

Marc: It is kind of interesting like separate all of these separate you know cultures.

Renee: And then it goes all through royalty. Like we end up in the Tudor era where no one's allowed to wear purple, right? Like, yeah, it finds its way everywhere. Like, yeah, you advertised it until today where you see someone with a Birkin bag and you know they paid $38,000 for that thing. They could have had a car, but they have that bag instead, right?

Marc: Here is what's the, I mean, of course, the Birkin bag, but what's the plaid thing, the brown and the black and the red? Oh, Burberry. Burberry, yeah, yeah. Like, yeah, yeah. Anyways, it's not nearly as expensive as Birkin, but like, you know, it's, yeah, whatever. The problem underneath the nail adornments, all of those different systems and materials that they use, it's the same one that I have when I'm working on a model. All right. So I know there's like models and nails. Okay. All right. Your nail is keratin. The same stuff as hair and horn and animals, right? It's hard. It's slick. It's kind of waxy, right? It's kind of got a weird waxy finish. And getting color to stick to that and stay is kind of hard, right? You had to soak your fingers for hours, right, in the gelatin and egg yolk or egg whites and, you know, all that stuff, you know, the beeswax. Those old, you know, ingredients, those are the binders. They do exactly the same job nitrocellulose does now. And it glues the color down to the nail and it seals it just like it does with plastic.

Renee: And for thousands of years, it barely changed. Plant dye, natural binder, a lot of patience while it dried. Then in about a 10-year stretch in the 20th century, the whole thing flips. And it flips because of cars.

Marc: This is so cool. I was talking to Tara about this as we were driving around today because she asked, of course, you know, she always asks, what are you doing on the podcast? And I talk about nails. You know, oh, good, you know, talking about the nail stuff. Thousands of years, nothing changes, and then boom. All right. So it's such a clean case of one industry solving its problem and accidentally handing the answer to another. So here we are, early 1920s. The car makers had a bottleneck. Paint took days, sometimes weeks to dry, like watching paint dry, right? Oh, right. That makes sense now. A car body would just sit there curing. You can't run a moving assembly line If the paint needs a fortnight To dry and cure Have you seen some of the assembly lines now. The bodies are on these Things and they just like spin them through The paint, the vat, It just goes and spins around Just keeps on chucking down The assembly line, So DuPont Of course it's DuPont It had to be DuPont Cracks the problem with nitrocellulose lacquer They had a mountain of nitrocellulose left over from making explosives in the First World War. And they turned it into fast-drying colored lacquer. You could spray it on, it dries in minutes, and it came in colors. Like, you know, this is the thing that put color on the cars while Ford was still mostly selling black. You could have the Model T in every color as long as it's black, right?

Renee: Right. So and someone looked at that freshly painted car and thought, hey, what else has a hard, glossy surface? I know. Fingernails women won't mind wearing explosives i just

Marc: Like this is i yeah i i couldn't find a really good like like tell of what like what happened here but like the next part of the story like the people we know about who the people were but like like what gave them the idea you know, so more or less, french you know makeup artist michelle menard adapted the car lacquer into something thin enough to wear on a nail. Modern nail polish walks straight out of a car paint shop here.

Renee: And then it gets a sales machine behind it. In 1932, a couple of brothers named Rebson and a chemist named Lachman started a company. They take the L from Lachman and they call it Revlon. And they sell one thing others didn't. Opeg color. Before that, polish was sheer. So it was a sheer pink, right? It was just like very tasteful, not very bougie, apparently, very forgettable. Like if you worked in a law firm, you could wear it, right? Revlon sold a—and it's called Revlon Red. Just so we're clear, if you go to buy this in the drugstore today, you will pick up the red color of Revlon, and it will be Revlon Red. And it was a full saturated red, and it matched your lipstick. Salons first, then department store counters in the country. And think about what that actually did. And for 5,000 years, deep red nails meant you were untouchable. You were loyalty. You were top of the pile. Revlon put that same red on a shelf for pocket change. By the till where a factory girl could buy it on a Friday, wear it out dancing that night, right? The thing that used to mean, do not touch me, I outrank you, becomes a small affordable thrill anyone could have. That's a radical flip, and it happened in about a decade. And then Hollywood did the rest. A close-up of a woman's hand with a perfect red nail, 50 feet tall on a cinema screen. There was even a signature look, the moon manicure, where you left the little half-moon. I haven't seen one of those in years, though. I hope it comes back. A little half moon at the base. You leave it bare so the color frame the nail. Glamour, you could study at the pictures on Saturday and copy in your own kitchen table on Sunday after church. You can't wear red nails. So you did it after church.

Marc: Beth actually did the red tips just.

Renee: Oh, see, that's another one. It's the red French manicure. Yeah, those are pretty tips. Yeah.

Marc: So the chemistry is what made that reach possible. Cheap pigment, fast solvent, a brush. You could not have done it with beeswax and crushed petals.

Renee: That's the real shift in the whole story. For 5,000 years, color was a permission. Now it's a choice. That's new. That is the 20th century. That had to be at least a tiny bit empowering.

Marc: Yeah. I don't know how many times we witness these kinds of like just massive shifts.

Renee: And it's all kind of, it's all the 20th century. It's almost like we evolved then. It was like, you know what I mean? It's like we figured out more things to do with the stuff we had. So like we have this, like this stuff left over. Let's use it for this. Oh, we put it on cars. Fantastic. Well, why don't we put it on other stuff? What else do we have like that? I don't know, people? Let's put it on them. I mean, it's the, it's go back to the peaceful use of the atom.

Marc: Like like we have nuclear.

Renee: We have nuclear stuff what can we do with it i don't know paint plates i mean we just did a yeah we did a lot of this stuff

Marc: Let's make glass out of it.

Renee: Oh my gosh so yeah so the 20th century really was this time of like yeah i mean it it it figures right i mean this is the time of edison i think we just had a lot of people who really were thinking like why can't i and they could yeah yeah

Marc: Yeah it's just, I don't know. It just blows my mind, right? There's a behavior that's only the most wealthy, the most powerful have access to for thousands of years. And then in the space of a handful of years, total democratization. Like nail polish is cheap.

Renee: Yeah, don't you think it follows democracy, though? It's almost like us peasants are shoving it right back in their face. Right? I'm going to wear purple. I'm going to wear red. I'm going to buy a car. I'm going to, you know what I mean? It's almost like, you know, come with the French revolution and then, you know, and then the, you know, the American experiment comes all of this ability to say, I don't care what you do. I can do the same thing. It's proving I'm free, right? I'm proving to you right now I'm free. I think it's kind of cool. I think it's kind of cool. And then it just keeps going. It just, it just keeps going because we're capitalists and entrepreneurs at heart, right? So it makes sense.

Marc: So this is where the salon and my hobby kind of collapse into one thing here so i build scale models mostly strange japanese robots renee can see them in the background there yeah but that's a different episode i we don't need to talk about that and the paints i use fall into the same families as what's in the in the bottle right so like there's roughly kind of three kinds in the model space with some, slightly confusing names but it doesn't really matter so the slow tough ones thinned with petrol and distillates. Those are usually called enamels. You know, petroleum distillates, like, that's what makes them, quote-unquote, oil paints, because it's petroleum. It's an oil. Water-based ones, I got a bunch of water-based ones here on my desk here. Little containers. Well done. You know, they're popular because they don't, like, they don't smell, right? They smell like, you know, paint, but not the nasty acetone smell. And then there's the hot ones, you know, the fast-drying, the rock hard, and the ones that smell like, okay, If I like, and the glue that I use is the same stuff, right? So this little tiny thing of glue, if I open it up and I'm using it and my door is open, like anywhere in the house, Beth will be like, close that door. Close it. Because it's really smelly. Right. So, you know, nail polish belongs with that last group, right? Those really smelly, you know, fast-drying paints.

Renee: Wait, so if I blindfolded you and wave my nail polish and your model paint under your nose, you wouldn't be able to tell them apart?

Marc: Yeah, probably not. And it's not just the smell, right? The thinners and, you know, the removers and reducers and things, they're mostly acetone or very close to acetone. And acetone is what I use to strip paint, you know, off a model and start again. So it's basically the same stuff. And like when the kids run out of nail polish remover, it's over here behind me. So there it is.

Renee: So the same solvent doing the same job on a nail and a model.

Marc: Yeah, the same job. And many of the tools cross over too, like the airbrush. It was invented in the 1870s to retouch photographs. Modelers use it to lay down paint, paint down in coats thinner than paper. You know the good nail salon now there's an airbrush doing you know gradients and tiny artwork on nails, you know same tool same physics same you know compressor all that that stuff the person doing a fade on a thumbnail and the person spraying camouflage on a model tanker holding the same instrument i've got a glass file in my hand like same glass file for your nails is the same one that i use on on the model so same tools yeah.

Renee: Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I spend time on YouTube. Such a waste of my life, but I do spend time on YouTube. And I'm into press-on nails. And you can buy a custom set, right? And they'll turn them into all kinds of stuff. And sometimes they're just using gel glue to do it, right? And then they paint it and all of a sudden you have strawberries or, you know, minions or like crazy stuff, right? And sometimes they're super long and they make them like so that they look like snow globes and you turn your finger upside down. It's crazy what they're able to do with this stuff, right? So, yeah, they're making models too and then they're gluing them onto the end of their fingers and saying, look how great I look. And then just proving that they definitely don't do dishes, right? Because they would just come right off. So, you're right, right? Like, you see them do the gradient stuff with that. I mean, those are, they call them nail artists. They aren't, those aren't people who just, you know, they'll charge you $250 for a set of, you know, real custom, right?

Marc: Somebody, I can't remember which kid it was, but they showed me one of these nails that, so I have four daughters, right? So I see nails a lot. And it was, somebody did a whole set of Peter Pan themed nails. And like you could turn them up and down and the little shadow peter pan's shadow would slide up and down inside inside the nail like i was like oh my gosh it's like those wicked.

Renee: Ones where one hands glinda and it does all the glinda stuff and then the other hands yeah it's really they've taken it they've taken it to your level like they've turned them into little models. And they use the tiny brushes. They spend all day doing it. They put them under magnifying glasses to get the detail work done. It's crazy.

Marc: It's crazy. You want to see my spectacles?

Renee: Yeah, see, there you go.

Marc: Yeah. So there's even a connection back to camphor. The same software made the first real plastic celluloid in the 1860s so nitrocellulose plus camphor they made billiard balls and toys out of it early model kits were made out of celluloid, um so you know film film reels right, this is why which which movie is that is it, is it is inglorious bastards that uh where they the they they they burned down the movie theater or something like that yeah yeah, and they they the lady starts the fire with the film because that stuff is super, super flammable. The way that it, because it was made out of nitrocellulose.

Renee: Well, they used to be very careful to use acetone to separate the film if it melted together. Because in storage, if it's not in cold storage, it melts. Yeah. Crazy.

Marc: That stuff is super volatile. So the coat on a fingernail and the first plastic toy soldier are chemically cousins, right? Same two ingredients, but, you know, about a century apart.

Renee: The chemistry in that salon has actually moved on from nitrocellular story, though, right? I mean, what a lot of people, they get gel now, and the gel does not behave like the bottle at all. And I can peel it off in two seconds. I'm doing something wrong. I'm definitely doing something wrong because gel does not last on my fingers as much as polish does.

Marc: Yeah, so it's a different kind of mechanism. The bottle, like your nail polish, it dries, right? The solvent leaves and the film stays. Gel doesn't dry it it's what's called a cures right so you paint it on and nothing happens until you put your hand under the little lamp, and then it then it sets it cures all at once you know in about 30 seconds liquid turning into solid through a reaction that the light you know light switches on.

Renee: Now i just told you i'm really into press on nails and that's how i get my nails on i actually i put that you put that stuff it's gel glue you put that on you put the nail on top of it it'll stay it won't go anywhere and then you just stick it under the lamp it cures and now your nails don't go anywhere you could wear fake ones for a week right yeah yeah and you know what else they make is like nail polish that is half gelled so it so it looks it just looks like a nail shape and you go buy it you peel it off you put it on your finger and then you you put you tuck in all the corners and everything you peel off anything that is left over and then you cure it and like then you don't have to actually have a bottle nothing smells and it's just this it's a really thin bit of gel that's half cured like it's actually pretty good and the little lamp you put I have one at home you stick your hand in it with a glove that has the fingers cut off because you don't want your hand looking old because it is UV, right? And you stick your hand in it and it cures and you're done. Yeah, you're done.

Marc: The light kicks off a reaction that locks the whole liquid into a solid mesh. And like, this is super common now. Tons and tons of different industrial use cases, right? So the same idea as a dentist curing a filling under a blue light, right? They make you put the yellow glasses on, right? Because it blocks the UV laser that they're using or the UV light that they use to cure. The same idea as a resin 3D printer building a model out of liquid. We talked about the printers before. They build, you know, layer by layer and then use UV light to cure it, you know, one layer at a time. I don't have one of those printers, but, like, the kids really want one. So, yeah. It's just, but the resin kind of smells and, you know, like, you know, what are you going to do? I already have too many models. Like, if I printed more, then I would just have more to, you know, anyways. So uncured resin and uncured gel smell, you know, kind of the same.

Renee: There's a real health story here that's been in the news, people developing allergies to gel.

Marc: Yeah. So one ingredient in particular, so it's this one small, very grippy little molecule, which is why it's used and why it's a problem. So, you know, small, meaning it can get into your skin if the gel is not fully cured. And enough exposure and you sensitize yourself to it. And then you react to things in the same family for life, including some dental materials and medical glues. That would really suck if you could get dental fillings.

Renee: Or not have to get stitches because you could have used medical glue. All of that is bad.

Marc: Yeah, yeah. The industry is moving away from this one particular ingredient, HEMA. HEMA has got a really long name. And the controls around it are getting stricter about fully curing. And I'm sure the Texan lilies, you know, would be able to tell you a lot more than I could. Yeah.

Renee: I should have had one of them as a guest. I want to talk about a more recent trend that's coming out of that allergen fear. Clean beauty. For about 15 years, the selling point hasn't been the color. It's been about what is not in the bottle. You can see it right on the label. You know, three free, five free, ten free, climbing like a leaderboard. Each number is a list of things they've taken out.

Marc: Yeah. So the first ones, you know, the three free kind of stuff is, you know, these are the easy ones to take out. a plasticizer tied to certain health worries, some harsh solvents, and, hmm, yum, formaldehyde. They pulled that on safety grounds. Model paint, you know, they did sort of a similar clear out around the same time and still going through that today. Old hobby paints are, like, there's even a sub-industry, you know, someday, or I'll geek out about this.

Renee: Yeah, okay.

Marc: The old Star Wars, you know, Industrial Light and Magic guys out of Van Nuys, the original 1976-1977 workshop, they use a specific type of paint. And model guys, like, they try to find these old bottles of paint because you can still use it. And some of them go for a very, very high price because you just can't find them anymore because the chemicals that they use are different today versus, you know, then. but they're like way more toxic. So anyways, if you want more toxicity, go buy old paint. They're full of nasty solvents and even lead pigments. And the whole hobby swung, you know, hard to water-based over the last, you know, probably 20 years or so. Two unrelated industries, right? Same pressure, though. Same sort of time frame and the same direction. Let's clean it up and make it safer.

Renee: You know, it reminds you of Van Gogh. Like Van Gogh would paint, right, with lead paint. And he had a habit of, when he wasn't using the brush, to stick it in his mouth to keep it wet. And so he would just suck on them. So he's sucking off the lead paint. No wonder he was crazy. Like, where do you think that goes? Lead goes straight to your brain, and it makes you nutty, right? So, like, yeah, it makes me think of that. Like, he, oh, the poor man. Yeah, he didn't think there was anything wrong with that. And probably no one else did either, right? It's why we don't paint walls so little kids don't eat paint chips. We don't use lead paint in houses anymore, right? Yeah. But notice what that nail version was really selling. Free thumb. Not the color you want. It's a fear you're answering. The whole language flipped from glamour to no, no, you'll be okay. It's reassurance, right? 5,000 years of selling status. And now the pitch is, this one won't kill you. That tells you something about what people are actually buying. And here is another version of this label never mentions, right? The person breathing it all day is the tech, not the customer. The customer sits for an hour. The tech sits there for a career. And a lot of the move to lower fume formulas and better salon ventilation is really about the people working at the table, not the people at it. And one other thing I would say is like when they're doing acrylic nails, like, you know, they make sure they put a mask on and then they have a mask inside that mask because years of that you end up with the same thing that guys who cut cabinets end up with right and and geez all i wanted was nice nails i didn't want to kill anybody right so yeah i'm glad that happens

Marc: That acrylic stuff i didn't you know i didn't put too much of the acrylic stuff in here but because a lot of in a lot of ways the gel is kind of superseded that but the the acrylic stuff like If that gets into your lungs, it's like plastic, you know? It's plastic stuff in your lungs. You don't want that.

Renee: You don't want that.

Marc: So we're talking about nails and paint and nitrocellulose and all that stuff. So where does it go from here? The whole coatings world, doesn't matter what application you're talking about, cars, furniture, electronics, it's all moving the same way off of the solvent-based paints onto water-based and light-cured systems. I've seen, okay, I do spend not a lot of time on YouTube, but one of the things that I do like is these guys that build these tables, the really fancy wooden tables, and these fancy wooden tables. You know, they use different types of finishes and stuff, and now they're moving to, like, oil-based, UV-cured finishes, you know? And it's like, wait, what? How does, like, my head's scratching? Like, how does the chemistry work in these sorts of things? But, like, the amount of time and the safety, the advantages of using these, you know, instant-cure systems is a lot better. Because, you know, factories don't want to pump solvent into the air, right? They want to be more efficient and they want to have, they don't want to OSHA, you know, bring down their next term. And nail blotch is kind of like a tiny version there.

Renee: Yeah, I mean, I don't think any manufacturer wants to give their employees cancer. Like, I don't think that doesn't do well for creating artisans who can continue. Well, all right. So more gel, less of the smell.

Marc: I would point you to Lockheed and some of the lawsuits that they've settled in the last 25 years. Yeah, exactly. More gel, less smell. So more light-cured chemistry probably, right, is what we're going to see, if they can solve the allergy problem. There's also work on growing the film former from plants instead of treated cotton. And the same materials keep turning up in odd places, right? The line between a nail coat, a dental resin, and a 3D printer is already pretty thin. So we might even see nanocoatings that get us closer to, you know, the Arnold movie, Total Recall, where, do you remember, she's choosing the colors, you know, she's tapping on her. On her finger. Oh. And the nail color changes dynamically. Like I've seen, it's not quite there. But it's pretty interesting, like the way that they use these special coatings that are then, that could change multiple colors, you know.

Renee: I saw a girl in Japan say she was getting a manicure and she sat in front of a machine. She stuck her hand in there. She picked like what she wanted. And then she just sat there and when she pulled her hand out, it was done. And I thought, oh man.

Marc: It's like a 3D printer for nails. So you just slide it in and it's like, it is crazy. I've seen those machines. Those are so cool. Like, and not to, you know, not to say, you know, nail techs are out of a job, right? Or anything like that. I'm sure they're, you know, they've got a long way to go, but like those machines, like, you know, that'll make the job a lot easier, you know?

Renee: Right. Right.

Marc: Yeah. Well...

Renee: So the oldest version never actually died. People still do henna. There's a whole market now for the plant dye, the natural binder, the no harsh solvent option. After a century of better chemistry, a real share of people are walking back toward the recipe from 3,000 years ago. Not because it performs better, but because of what it says about them. Yeah, it's that whole, like, analog life. I'm going to go live the analog life. Yeah. Okay, go ahead. And that is the whole arc sitting in one bottle 5,000 years of using the nail to show where you sat in the order Then a century of chemistry making color cheap enough That anyone could have any of it And now with all of it on the shelf The choice itself is a message The bare nail, the natural henna The loudest red in the shop, which is what I would pick It's still you telling everyone something about who you are

Marc: Yeah, it's the same tension as everywhere in materials, right? High-performance synthetic on one side, the gentle natural thing on the other. And most consumers, right, flip-flopping depending upon the week.

Renee: And whether it's your wedding, because you would never wear wet right to your wedding, right? It would be like this nice sheer pink because that's not what you do. Anyway, 15 milliliters on a salon table, car paint, gun cotton, and 5,000-year-old status symbol all at once.

Marc: Yeah, and the same family of chemistry. I've been breathing over a model bench for years. I walked into the salon. Sure, I knew nothing about what they do, but I walked out realizing I had been doing a version of it. Not nearly as cool as them, you know, with stupid Japanese plastic robots. But, you know, yeah, I've been doing the same thing the whole time.

Renee: So maybe you'll go get a manicure where they can give you a nice clear polish. It'll be nice.

Marc: They want it. They were like, you should come in. We'll do an episode of the podcast while you get your nails done. And I was like.

Renee: I think. You know what? Now you have to go in, play this podcast while you get your nails done. I think they'll love it.

Marc: Yeah, perhaps.

Renee: Ladies, thanks for taking care of the girls. If you enjoyed this one, like, subscribe, share it with someone. You can reach us at nostalgicnerdpodcast at gmail.com. Marc reads everything. Thanks for listening, you guys.

Marc: Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next time.

Renee: Thanks, Marc.