Anything like Nail Polish

[Medusa Gladiatrix]

I wonder if it was possible to put some kind of a color onto finger and toe nails. Would henna, which is known to dye the skin and hair, stay on nails? Are there any references for this or any other substances that the Ancient women liked to color their nails?

[Epictetus]

I’m not sure Roman women around the time of Augustus used any sort of nail polish. I glanced through Ovid’s third book in the Art of Love, which was addressed to women, and I haven’t seen anything. In fact, there are some statements that seem to show that nail polish was unknown, or at least unused.

Let her whose fingers are fat, or nails rough, mark what she says with but little gesture.

Ovid, AoL III, 276

Couldn’t “rough” nails be covered by polish? Elsewhere Ovid does talk about covering skin blemishes with makeup.

In other places he talks about keeping the hands clean (for women) and cutting fingernails (for men), but I don’t see anything that could be construed as referring to nail polish. Ovid also has a specific work on cosmetics and there was nothing there either that I noticed.

But perhaps Greek or Egyptians used nail polish?

[M. Demetrius]

Sally Pointer's book (which I don't have handy at the moment) The Artifice of Beauty indicates fingernails might have been stained with plant dyes, but I don't remember anything about their having been being painted.