In ancient times, nail sleeves were also called hand guards and gold drives. As long as people who have watched TV plays in the Qing Dynasty, they basically know the style inside. Although no one will wear those grandiose nail sleeves at present, in the Qing Dynasty, nail sleeves were very popular decorations among the nobles of the Qing Dynasty.
Both men and women like to have long nails. For men, long nails represent noble status, for women, they represent beauty. Because the bracket is too long, it will be very easy to break and may cause harm to the opponent. So in order to protect their long nails, they have a nail sleeve, which naturally only the Huang family has. It is because they have plenty of food and clothing that they don't have to work hard to survive, so they can afford long nails and nail covers.
Slowly, it is precisely because of the popularity of nail covers among nobles that the function of simply protecting nails has become a symbol of power. At first, fingernails were unisex, but later they gradually became exclusive to women. In the Qing dynasty, nails represented a person's status. The higher the status of the concubines in the harem, the more exquisite the nails they wear.
For concubines in the Qing Dynasty, fingernails were equivalent to their gold and silver jewelry. Maybe everyone loves beauty, so they like to make their fingernails exquisite. The materials they make are also all kinds of jewelry and jade, and they have to decorate and carve on them.
In addition, women in the Qing dynasty always took slender fingers as beauty, which should be a sentence now. The hand is a woman's second face, and the nail cover can show the slender fingers well. In addition, because the towering bun and high and low shoes of Su Like women in Qing Dynasty were several centimeters thick, it was said that the long nail sleeves matched their whole clothes very well.