According to the Vermont Country Store, French manicures have existed for even longer than that. They sell a pencil designed to whiten the underside of the nail and claim it’s been around since 1889.
And I’m sure that ladies have been trying to whiten the free edge of the nail since time immemorial. White nail tips would have been an easy way to indicate that a woman was not a peasant. A peasant wouldn’t have very clean nails and probably wouldn’t have nails long enough for the free edge to really be noticeable anyway.
IMHO, French manicures are cheesy but tolerable. French pedicures on the other hand are vomit-inducing. I can’t understand why anyone would want to make their toenails look longer!
See, this is why men get mixed up. They confuse “makeup” with “makeup that is supposed to be obvious.” (That’s not saying that all obvious makeup is ugly. Red lipstick and lots of eyeliner can look good.)
.The OP was based on the faulty assumption that there is some genetic basis for the use of lip-coloring by women. This may be part of deliberate effort to get people to give faulty responses. Because the nature of the practice seems to align with sexual behavior, it’s easy to equate that with evolution and genetics, then point out the flaws in that reasoning. The problem with this and other similar questions about behavior is the specificity of the phenomena. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume a genetic basis for the cooperative and competitive activities of people, but that is quite different than assuming there is a genetic basis for the sport of baseball.
This question has brought responses to show the fault in the observations that the question is based on. We’ve seen a variety of people who say they don’t like makeup, that the practice varies in cultures and across time, plus the influence of culture. The value of these questions in fighting ignorance is pointing out how we can’t know the answer to a question like this, and showing how the possible answers are inconclusive, even if they have a reasonable basis.
I don’t see that. All that’s been said is that people don’t like lipstick when it is obviously fake. This is true of any sexual enhancing factor: overdo it, and the attractiveness decreases. And different people have different levels of where it that line is.
Anyways, science is all about offering hypotheses and then testing them. It is not about saying “This is unknowable.” Giving reasonable answers is the point, until we can devise a test.
You’re making a good point, and I state things too absolutely. But ‘until we can devise a test’ is a little weak, I would go with ‘to help devise a test’. There are some untestable things, and unknowable until we get a time machine. I’m probably just too nit-picky about some things.