ARTIFICIAL

A History of Cosmetics
FENJA GUNN
HENRY VIII
John Bowie
Among famous kings, Henry VIII stands pre-eminent in English history. He
changed the future of the nation by destroying papal power and consolidating a
sovereign state. Carrying the country through a time of revolution he maintained
its unity and increased its strength by fortifying the coastline and founding the
Royal Navy.
New impression
8? x 5 }in Illustrated
THE WICKEDEST AGE
The Life and Times of George III
Alan Lloyd
George III ascended the throne when England’s empire had begun to take shape.
The Industrial Revolution, growing maritime trade and geographical exploration
marked his age. He held the throne longer than any sovereign before him and his
successors, except Victoria. The last English monarch to insist on ruling while he
reigned, George seemed stubbornly out of pace with his contemporaries. Where
The Artificial Face
 The
Artificial
Face
A History of Cosmetics

Fenja Gunn
with drawings by the author

David & Charles : Newton Abbot

 0 7153 6299 2

© Fenja Gunn 1973

All rights reserved. No part of this

publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission
of David & Charles (Holdings) Limited

Set in 11 on 13 pt Times Roman

and printed in Great Britain
by Ebenezer Baylis & Son Ltd
The Trinity Press Worcester and London
for David & Charles (Holdings) Limited
South Devon House Newton Abbot Devon
TO ANTHONY
 CONTENTS
page
Foreword 15
PartOne INTRODUCTION
1 The Origins of Cosmetics 19
2 Cosmetics in Antiquity: The Middle East 26
3 Cosmetics in Antiquity: Greece and Rome 38

Part Two A HISTORY OF COSMETICS IN

ENGLAND
4 Early Britain and the Middle Ages 53
5 Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries 70
6 The Seventeenth Century 89
‫ ר‬The Eighteenth Century 109
8 The Nineteenth Century 126
9 The Twentieth Century (1899-1945) 141
10 The Twentieth Century (1945-1970s) 161

Bibliography 181

Acknowledgements 189

Index 191
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

facing page
1 Primitive body and face painting, south-eastern
Nuba in the Sudan 32
2 Ceremonial face painting, Mount Hagen in
New Guinea 32
3 Bust of Queen Nefertiti 33
4 Wall frieze from the tomb of Nebamun, Thebes 33
5 Head of Ashurnasirpal, King of Nimrud 33
6 Greek head vase, c 470 bc 48
‫ר‬ Greek drinking cup with figures, 490-80 bc 48
8 Etruscan folding mirror, 200 bc 48
9 A Lady at her Toilet, fourteenth century 49
10 Medieval perfumer’s shop 49
11 A Lady Bathing, c 1320 49
12 Portrait of a Lady by Rogier Van der Weyden 64
13 Portrait of a Lady in Red, Florentine school 64
14 Anne Boleyn by an unknown artist 65
15 Queen Elizabeth I by an unknown artist 65
16 Queen Elizabeth I, detail of an engraving by
William Rogers 80
17 An Elizabethan Gentleman, portrait miniature by
Nicholas Hillyarde 80
18 A Lady at her Looking-glass 81
19 Charles II as a young man, by an unknown artist 81
20 Nell Gwyn by Peter Lely 96
21 ‘The Winter Habit’, engraving by Hollar
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

facing page
22 Mrs Siddons by Thomas Gainsborough 97
23 ‘Dressing for a Birthday’ by ThomasRowlandson 97
24 ‘The Prepostrous Head Dress or the
Featherd Lady’ 112
25 ‘The Toilet Head-dress’ 112
26 The Countess’s Morning Levee, from ‘Marriage
a la Mode’, by William Hogarth 112
27 ‘The Progress of the Toilet’ by James Gillray 113
28 Beau Brummell, engraving from a portrait miniature 128
29 Regency fashion plate 128
30 A Lady at the Court of St James 128
31 Label for Rowland’s ‘Kalydor for Improving and
Beautifying the Complexion’ 129
32 Advertising leaflet for Pears’ Soap 129
33 Sarah Bernhardt 129
34 Mme Lubov Tchernicheva as ‘Scheherazade’ 144
35 Edwardian evening dress 144
36 Elizabeth Arden advertisement of the 1920s 144
37 Greta Garbo 145
38 Rita Hayworth 160
39 Audrey Hepburn 161
40 Yardley’s ‘holster’ lipstick advertisement 176
41 Boots make-up advertisement 176
42 Jean Shrimp ton 177
 DRAWINGS

Figure page
1 Glazed composition kohl-pots, c 600 bc 28
2 Wooden ointment spoon, c 1300 bc 29
3 Ivory ointment spoon, c 1300 bc 30
4 Wooden cosmetic box, Greek or Roman 39
5 Ivory comb, Roman 44
6 Rock crystal cosmetic vase and carved ivory
cosmetic pot, Roman, third century ad 45
7 Clay rouge pot, fourth century bc 46
8 Bronze mirror, first century ad 55
9 Ivory comb, French, fourteenth century 61
10 Ivory mirror case, German, c 1350-60 64
11 Pomander or scent case, Dutch, c 1600 73
12 Perfume burner, Italian, sixteenthcentury 80
13 Ivory comb, German, c 1520 83
14 Nell Gwyn’s looking-glass, English, mid-
seventeenth century 97
15 Carved wall mirror, English, c 1670 103
16 Perfume essence case, Dutch, late seventeenth
century 105
17 Staffordshire bust of a lady wearing patches, c 1740 112
18 Pique-work patch box, French, c 1740 114
19 Solid carved-ivory upper set of dentures, eighteenth
or early nineteenth century 115
20 Porcelain rouge pot and applicator, late eighteenth
century 116
 DRAWINGS

Figure page
21 Brass soap box, English, eighteenth century 117
22 ‘Windsor’ soap, nineteenth century 133
23 ‘Oxford Lavender’ scent bottles, nineteenth century 133
24 Silver toothpick holder, Portuguese, c 1853-61 134
25 ‘Exquisita’ eau de cologne bottle, English,
late nineteenth century 135
26 Lalique toilet-water bottle, c 1920 147
27 Long-handled powder puffs, c 1925-30 148
28 Manicure set, c 1920 149
29 Vanity case, made in Japan, early 1930s 150
30 Glass powder bowl, c 1930 158
31 Modern lipsticks 171
32 Bottles of nail varnish 173
33 Make-up palettes 174
34 Glass jar with plastic lid, Mary Quant 176
35 White plastic bottle, Mary Quant 177
36 Black plastic container, Yardley 178

PLATES listed above are reproduced by courtesy of the follow-

ing: Agyptisches Museum, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, 3;
Elizabeth Arden, 36; Bodleian Library, 31, 32; Boots & Co Ltd,
41; British Film Institute Stills Library, 37, 38, 39; Trustees of
the British Museum, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 16, 18, 21, 23, 24,25,
27; British Theatre Museum, 33, 34; Professor James C. Faris,
Nuba Personal Art, Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd, 1; John
Freeman Photographic Library, 29, 30; National Gallery, 12,
13, 22, 26; National Portrait Gallery, frontispiece, 14, 15, 19, 20,
 DRAWINGS

28; Dr Andrew Strathern, 2; Victoria & Albert Museum, 17, 35;

Vogue Magazine, Conde Nast Publications Ltd, 42; Yardley &
Co Ltd, 40.

DRAWINGS listed above are reproduced by courtesy of the

following: Martin Battersby Esq, 26; Brighton Museum and
Art Gallery, 14, 17; British Museum, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; David
Crook Esq, 27; Harvey Daniels Esq, 29; Hampshire County
Museum Service, Winchester, 30; Edmund Launert Esq, 23;
Trustees of the London Museum, 19; Mrs Betty O’Looney, 28;
The Pitt-Rivers Museum, 20; Private collection, 24; Victoria &
Albert Museum, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 18, 21; The Welcome
Trustees, 16; Yardley & Co Ltd, 22, 25.

All the drawings are by the author.

 Foreword

The aim of this book is to illustrate, through a history of

cosmetic fashions, the changing ideals of beauty at different
historical periods. A detailed study of the daily toilet of both
men and women through the ages allows one to observe changes
in moral attitudes and social conditions, as well as the in-
fluences of positive events, such as wars or revolutions, which
alter the whole climate of a period.
The particular appeal of a historical study of this nature is
found in intimate detail and I felt, therefore, that it was essential
to narrow down my field of research to one country. Thus, the
main part of the book is devoted to the history of cosmetics in
England. Although there have been several encyclopaedic or
technical works on the subject and other books have described
the make-up fashions of a number of countries, very few have
dealt specifically with the toilette of English men and women.
The first three chapters of The Artificial Face are intended as
an introduction to the main part of the book. Chapter 1 deals
with the origins of cosmetics in prehistoric body and face paint-
ing, illustrated by examples from primitive societies. Chapters
2 and 3 describe the beauty preparations and customs of the
ancient Middle Eastern and Mediterranean civilisations. These
early cultures had a positive and continuing influence on the
cosmetics and make-up fashions of European countries,
including England.
The book covers every aspect of the appearance relating to the
 FOREWORD

4artificial face’, including hair styles, and also observes the

development of hygiene and perfumery.
Many books on beauty are written expressly or sub-
consciously in sympathy with the fashion ideal of the period
they describe. In The Artificial Face I have attempted to reveal
fashionable beauty through the eyes of painter and caricaturist
alike, and through the writings of both fashion followers and
puritan reformists. My intention has been that the fashionable
face should be viewed three-dimensionally and from every
possible, even if unflattering, angle. Material for the book has
been gathered from a number of contemporary sources, includ-
ing chronicles, diaries, recipe books, drama, prose and poetry.
The pen-and-ink drawings illustrate the type of cosmetic con-
tainers or toilet implements common to particular periods of
history. I have thus sought to reproduce the individual
character of each century, an intrinsic requirement of any study
as specialised as a history of cosmetics.
F.G.
 PART ONE

Introduction
 CHAPTER ONE

The Origins of Cosmetics

Primitive art is a practical instrument for the important business

of daily living. (R. Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology
of the Creative Eye, 1960)

Throughout recorded history cosmetics have been used to create

the beauty ideal of each passing age and for centuries a daily
routine of beauty care has been an accepted 6ritual’ within a
social context. Women and even men, it seems, have always had
a fascination for changing their appearance with the aid of
paints, powders, dyes, depilatory devices and other artificial
methods, and the general acceptance of this practice as a mani-
festation of civilised living has disguised its ancient pagan
origins.
The use of cosmetics, far from being a product of civilisation,
originates from an inherent and primitive human need for self-
decoration. As far back as 100,000 bc, Neanderthal man is
believed to have painted his body and practised tattooing, the
earliest form of 6cosmetic’ mutilation; and, at a later period,
the men of the New Stone Age are thought to have decorated
their bodies in a similar fashion. However, the original motiva-
tion behind prehistoric man’s use of paint was quite different
from that which inspired civilised cultures to adopt cosmetic
artifice as a means of enhancing or creating beauty.
Prehistoric man must have been conscious that he was a
 THE ARTIFICIAL FACE

weak animal in a totally hostile environment. As a hunter he

had to develop his own tools of aggression because Nature had
not provided him with sharp teeth or claws or the overwhelming
physical strength of the wild beasts which roamed the ancient
world. He was overawed and dominated by the elements and a
prey to countless fears engendered by the apparently mysterious
works of Nature. This prompted him to seek some form of
environmental camouflage and it is reasonable to assume that he
chose to disguise his human identity with paint. There are
numerous examples of this type of ‘camouflage’ existing in
primitive societies, and prehistoric men undoubtedly used body
painting for the same reasons as the Australian aboriginal, the
African tribesman or the North American Indian. First it was
used as a means of blending with the natural environment while
hunting or tracking prey; secondly as a means of stimulating
fear in an aggressive confrontation, and thirdly for spiritual and
social reasons. In all these cases primitive man exhibits his fear
of the natural environment and, paradoxically, his desire to
dominate it by aggression or, failing this, to come to terms with
it by placation.
He painted the markings of the most powerful animals on
his own skin because he believed that by representing their
physical characteristics on his body he acquired some of their
power. This magical strength could then be used spiritually to
dominate creatures of the animal world and to impress his own
kind. But his fear of wild beasts and his surroundings remained
as a constantly disturbing and inexplicable phenomenon, and
inspired primitive man with the belief that mysterious forces
were at work around him which he could neither understand
nor control. As a result he gave these forces tangible substance
by personifying them as gods. These deities of the primitive
world took the shape of wild beasts, birds and reptiles imbued by
man with mysterious powers over the environment. The trees,
wind, sun and stars also had a spiritual significance for primitive
 THE ORIGINS OF COSMETICS

humans, and worship of these powers took the form of com-

munal ritual in which the gods were placated with gifts and
promises of loyalty in return for their protection of the tribe.
Body and face painting played an essential part in these
ceremonies as it was used as a form of stage make-up by
dancers and singers enacting specific magical roles within the
ritual {Plate 1). Different patterns and colours were used to
define these roles and each primitive tribe developed its own
design forms which varied according to the ceremonial.
These decorative patterns were frequently an abstract repre-
sentation of the tribal totem, the animal or bird spirit which was
adopted by the community to protect its members from the
aggression of another tribe or the spectral forces of evil. The
totem spirit acted as an intermediary between man and nature
and its symbolic form once painted on the body acted as a
‘spiritual armour’. As primitive communities developed in size
and social complexity, different totems were adopted by clan
groups or individuals as a means of establishing their identity or
status within the society. Thus decorative body or tattoo patterns
increased in variety.
Colour also gave a specific character to body and face paint-
ings, and it is obvious that, at an early stage in the world’s
development, men were aware of the effect colour can have on
the human emotions. Some anthropologists believe that pre-
historic man first responded to the colours of the solar spectrum,
before blues and greens, because the sun represented a powerful
force which brought daylight and safety from the real and
imaginary dangers of night time. Among primitive peoples red
and yellow paints still have a special emotional significance.
The Australian aborigines regard yellow as the colour of peace
and all primitive communities use red body paint for important
ceremonials. The people of Mount Hagen in New Guinea colour
their skins with red ochre for festive rituals which celebrate
victory in battle or success in commercial exchange, and most
 THE ARTIFICIAL FACE

native tribes use red body dyes for initiation rites and burial
ceremonies and also as a sign of aggression in warfare. In many
cases red paint symbolically represents blood and it is believed
that primitive man, even in prehistory, used it on the bones of
corpses to effect ‘reanimation’ after death. Black and white
dyes are also much used in body decoration; black paint, which
symbolises night time and darkness, is frequently employed in
rituals of a sinister or aggressive character, whereas white paint
represents the amorphous nature of the spiritual world.
The domination of primitive peoples by their environment is
evident from the fact that daily life, ritual and nature are inextri-
cably intermingled and, as in the animal kingdom, different
moods are conveyed by physical display. Painted patterns and
graphic application of colour on the face and body are used in
primitive societies to create the right atmosphere for every
occasion. Thus, some tribal peoples have developed a whole
language of ‘cosmetic’ art with which to express their feelings.
Coloured designs, tattoos, the use of oils and fragrances or even
hairstyling are all employed to enhance a mood, convey a
meaning or define a social or sexual condition.
The Mount Hagen people of New Guinea use dyes to differ-
entiate between male and female elements in ritual ceremonies
(Plate 2). Black paint represents male aggression and hidden
strength, whereas red defines the female element, signifying
magic, friendliness, material wealth and fertility. Girls during
courtship use hair oil and paint a band of charcoal or red dye
across their foreheads, and decorate their faces with spots and
triangles of colour. Men decorate their features with red, yellow,
blue and white patterns, which are echoed again in the magnifi-
cent painted wigs they wear as a symbol of male potency. These
edifices of hair and the bright colours of courtship are immedi-
ately rejected during a period of mourning, when the well-oiled
bodies of both sexes are smeared with ashes and mud to give
the opposite effect to a shining polished skin. Australian
 THE ORIGINS OF COSMETICS

aborigines have an elaborate system of colouring during a

mourning period. A man paints his face and torso if his wife or
brother-in-law dies and a woman does the same after the death
of her husband. Black paint is used for a death in one’s own
generation, whereas red is the colour used for parents of the
children’s generation.
Various stages of physical development are also marked by
the use of paint or ‘cosmetic’ devices. The people of Nuba in
the Sudan use a particular hair style and body scarification to
indicate that a child has reached the age of eight or nine, and in
many tribes puberty is marked by initiation rites which include
ritual painting and tattooing of the body. The pain inflicted on
the initiate by the execution of these tattoos is an essential part
of the ceremony, but in many societies tattoos are considered
an aid to beauty in their own right.
The elaborate forms of ‘cosmetic mutilation’ found in native
communities, such as tattooing, plucking out facial and body
hair, filing teeth and deliberate deformation of physical features,
also find their parallels in civilised cultures. The extraordinary
idea that one ‘must suffer to be beautiful’ may well originate
from the primitive initiation ceremony in which the initiate had
to suffer ‘cosmetic mutilation’ to justify his manhood. At any
rate, the eyebrow tweezer has remained throughout history as
the most universally popular cosmetic implement, and the pain-
ful plucking out of facial hair has been practised in civilised
societies for centuries.
Undoubtedly personal vanity and a desire to appear attractive
to the opposite sex are important reasons for cosmetic decora-
tion. Painting and tattooing for ritual may have been the
original purpose of cosmetic art, but the simple human need to
attract sexually those of one’s own kind cannot be excluded as a
motivation. In primitive communities face paint and the use of
oils and fragrance are all employed to create physical desira-
bility as they have been in cultured societies, and in many cases
 THE ARTIFICIAL FACE

the ‘beauty’ effects which they are designed to achieve are also
similar. Paints are used to emphasise the eyes and highlight
facial characteristics; black dyes are employed to enhance the
beauty of a dark skin in the same way that white face powder is
used to create a pale complexion. Red ochre powder is employed
as a face colourant and for many centuries it was used as a
rouge by civilised cultures. Other natural materials, such as
chalk and powdered limestone, are employed in the manufacture
of face paints by primitive and cultured societies alike. Animal
and vegetable oils, used in their natural state by native tribes,
form the basis for many sophisticated beauty preparations, and
toilet implements, such as ‘make-up brushes’ made from twigs
and leaf swabs, are primitive editions of those used today.
Fragrant leaves, flowers and aromatic substances are substi-
tutes, in native societies, for perfumes or scented pomades.
Hairstyling is of equal importance to civilised and primitive
peoples. Judging from the numerous pins and ornaments which
have been found dating from the Neolithic period, interest in
the hair dates from prehistory. In some native societies, abun-
dant tresses symbolise male potency and in other cases the
styling, shaving or cutting of hair has a ritual significance.
However, for both sexes, a carefully nurtured and styled
‘coiffure’ is a desirable feature of beauty. Beeswax, resins and
oils are used as dressings or conditioners; ‘permanent waving’
techniques are employed to straighten the hair using sticks
and paste, and urine is used amongst primitive Indians as an
effective bleach. Elaborate wigs made from natural fibres or
hair are worn by many native peoples to provide supplementary
tresses.
In primitive societies the dependence on ritual influenced the
whole performance of personal grooming and application of
cosmetic paints. These followed set conventions whether used
for ceremonial or social purposes, and the toilet became in its
own right a form of ritual which occupied a particular period of
each day, as time was needed to achieve 6cosmetic’ perfection
and an artificial ideal of beauty.
Thus the daily creation of physical desirability by artifice has
become an essential part of everyday life in cultured societies,
and cosmetics which originated from paints used by primitive
man in prehistory to disguise his human appearance have
become an accepted form of social camouflage which stereo-
types facial characteristics into an image of beauty that varies
with the passage of time.
 CHAPTER TWO

Cosmetics in Antiquity:
The Middle East
Her lips are enchantment,
her neck the right length
and her breasts a marvel;
Her hair lapislazuli in its glitter,
her arms more splendid than gold.
Her fingers make me see petals,
The lotus’ are like that
(Love Poems of Ancient Egypt, translated from Ancient Egyptian
Papyri by Ezra Pound and Noel Stock)

The magical origins of body and face painting continued to

influence the early Middle Eastern and Mediterranean civilisa-
tions in their use of face paints, aromatics and ritual cleansing
as an intrinsic part of religious rites; and the ancient mystical
significance of self decoration affected the attitudes of these
civilisations to artificial beauty. It is an interesting fact that all
the early cultured peoples accentuated the eye, giving it promi-
nence over any other feature of the face. The importance of the
eye in antiquity has its origin in an ancient heritage of pagan
religion, superstition and magic. It has always been referred to
as the mirror of a man’s soul and in the ancient world was a
symbol of both good and evil. It was painted on ships to guide
them through troubled seas to safety. In ancient Egypt it was
the symbol of the sun god Re and in most early writings it
 COSMETICS IN ANTIQUITY

appears as a significant hieroglyphic device. It was thus logical

that the human eye should be given a special importance by
accentuation with cosmetic paints, thereby imbuing it with the
mystical quality of a sacred emblem.
The dominance of the eye as a symbol of beauty is clearly
seen in the frescoes and painted human images of ancient Egypt.
The perfect state of preservation of these images provides a
vivid picture of these people of antiquity. The sensuous vitality
of Tutankhamun and the handsome arrogance of Ankhenaten
represent masculine ideals in appearance, and the cool elegance
of Nefertiti has a timeless quality of feminine beauty. The
Egyptians were a handsome people with symmetrically formed
features and richly bronzed faces framed by sculptured wigs of
ebony hair. Their appearance was rendered even more exotic by
the extravagant nature of their eye make-up. The dark almond-
shaped eyes of both sexes were ringed with a dark green cosmetic
or outlined with black paint drawn into winged lines at the end
corner of the eye (Plate 3).
The origin of Egyptian eye-paint, or msdmt as it was called, is
not clearly known. There is evidence of the importation of
eye make-up from China during the twelfth and eighteenth
dynasties, and other evidence is provided by a fresco which
shows an Egyptian nobleman receiving a present of eye-paint
from the Aamu people of western Asia. Raw materials for
manufacturing this make-up were available in Egypt; the Far
East and western Asia may simply have been alternative
sources for this cosmetic commodity rather than its places of
origin.
Egyptian eye make-up predominantly consisted of malachite,
a green ore of copper, and galena, a dark grey ore of lead.
Malachite was the earlier form of eye-paint and was obtained
in its raw state from Sinai and the eastern desert, whilst galena
was found near Aswan and the Red Sea coast. Other materials
for eye-paint, or kohl, included carbonate of lead, oxide of
 THE ARTIFICIAL FACE

copper, iron and manganese, brown ochre, chrysocolla—a

greenish-blue copper ore—and sulphide of antimony. All these
materials were obtained locally with the exception of antimony
which was imported from Asia Minor, Persia and possibly
Arabia.
Eye-paint was prepared by grinding the raw materials on a
stone slab or palette after which the compound was placed in a
container. Shells, hollow reeds and small alabaster vases were
used to contain kohl until it was needed, when it was probably
mixed with animal fat or a vegetable oil. It was also applied in
powder form over a base of ointment; but in either case a
wooden or ivory stick was used to paint the cosmetic substance

Fig 1 (left) glazed composition kohl-pot, with wooden kohl stick, held by
the god Bes, c 600 bc; (right) glazed composition cosmetic pot in the shape
of a hedgehog, c 600 bc
 COSMETICS IN ANTIQUITY

round the eyes. The underside of the lid was frequently painted
with green malachite whilst the upper lid, lashes and brows were
darkened with galena.
Apart from the decorative value of this exotic eye-paint, there
is evidence that it was used for medicinal purposes. A copper
substance used in the paint guarded against suppuration of the
eyes due to the intense glare of the sun and acted as a preventive
measure against eye diseases which were prevalent during the

Fig 2 Wooden ointment spoon in the shape of a

bouquet of lotus flowers with buds of tinted ivory,
c 1300 bc
 THE ARTIFICIAL FACE

Fig 3 Ivory ointment spoon

with carved handle in the
shape of a Hathor head and
two uraei, c 1300bc

period of the Nile’s inundation. For this reason children as

well as men and women were encouraged to use kohl.
Once her eyes were decoratively painted, the aristocratic
Egyptian woman would have turned her attention to the rest of
her toilet. Her cheeks and lips would have been dyed with a
mixture of red ochre combined with fat or oil and, in the case of
the rouge, a little gum resin was added as an ingredient. The
palms of her hands and her finger nails were reddened with a
dye made from henna, and the nipples of her breasts were gilded
with gold paint. Cleansing creams, used to preserve her skin in
good condition, were made from animal or vegetable oil mixed
with lime or chalk, and soothing ointments were compounded
of fat, wax and powdered limestone. These cosmetic concoc-
tions were always scented with crushed flower petals, aromatic
 COSMETICS IN ANTIQUITY

spices and perfumes to render them pleasant to use. Aristocratic

men also made use of the same wide range of cosmetic materials,
especially aromatic oils and ointments.
Another aspect of the toilet which was of prime importance
to the ancient Egyptians was the use of depilatory devices to rid
their bodies and heads of hair. 6Egyptians are shaven at other
times, but after a death they let their hair and beard grow.’
(Herodotus.) Depilatory creams, razors and pumice stones were
used for this purpose; both sexes shaved themselves bald and
wore elaborate wigs. These were dyed ebony black or dark red
with henna, and made from human hair dressed with beeswax,
flax, wool or palm fibre. The poorer classes had to be content
with felt. The wigs worn by the aristocracy were braided and
plaited into shape and frequently embellished with exotic
jewellery, but the most magnificent wigs adorned the Pharaohs
who also wore plaited false beards on ceremonial occasions.
During the reign of the heretic Pharaoh, Ankhenaten, wigs
became particularly flamboyant. Men wore vast curled con-
coctions and women adorned themselves with top heavy edifices
of hair festooned with long plaited artificial tresses (Plate 4).
The fashion for this total lack of natural hair undoubtedly
stemmed from an understandable obsession with hygiene. The
high temperatures reached in the Nile valley encouraged germs
and diseases to breed. The shaving of all body hair was an
excellent preventive measure against infection whilst maintain-
ing a degree of comfort in the hot Middle Eastern weather. The
Egyptians are reputed to have bathed several times a day and
Herodotus states that 6they set cleanness above seemliness’. Each
bath or douche was followed by liberal applications of perfumes
and unguents, and guests were offered the courtesy of having
their feet and hands bathed and scented with aromatic oils.
Their heads were also anointed with sweet smelling perfumes.
Perfumery was yet another aspect of the Egyptian toilet
which, like the use of eye-paint, had its roots in mysticism and
 THE ARTIFICIAL FACE

magic. The preparation of aromatic scents was, in the early

stages of Egyptian civilisation, entirely the specialist preserve of
priests, who used aromatics as an essential part of religious
ceremonies and in the process of embalming. Sacrificial oxen
were disembowelled and filled 4with pure bread, honey, raisins,
figs, frankincense, myrrh, and other kinds of incense . . .’
(Herodotus), whilst the corpses of humans were rinsed out with
palm wine and crushed spices after which their empty stomachs
were filled with 4pure ground myrrh and cassia and any other
spices, save only frankincense . . .’ (Herodotus.) Wealthy
aristocrats were injected with aromatic cedar oil through the
body orifices.
The use of perfumes in priestly ritual imbued scent with a
special magical significance and is probably the reason why
Egyptian perfumed cosmetics were held in such esteem by the
rest of the civilised world during the course of ancient history.
Egyptian scented oils and unguents were prepared from a
variety of natural ingredients, including myrrh, cinnamon,
cassia, cardamon, spikenard, iris root, honey, wine, aromatic
resins and scented woods. The process of perfume distillation
had not been invented, so all scents were based on fat or oil to
ensure a degree of fixation. Sesame, almond, olive and castor oil
were used and 4balanos’ oil, which was extracted from the shells
of some unknown fruit, was also favoured in the manufacture of
unguents. An important centre for aromatic cosmetics was
Mendes, and raw materials for ointments and oils were imported
from the Greek islands and other sources in the Middle East.
One of the most famous Mendesian unguents was a mixture of
4balanos’ oil, myrrh, cassia and gum resin, and this compound
was greatly favoured by ancient Egyptian society.
Perfumes and unguents frequently contained medicinal
properties and it is interesting to note that the Egyptian queen,
Cleopatra, is reputed to have combined her considerable talents
to produce a book on beauty preparations and an advanced
 white and blue
dye on a bright
red foundation.
3 (left) Bust of Queen Nefertiti.
Her exotic eye-paint is a good
example of the kind of eye
decoration used by both men and
women of ancient Egypt. The lips
are rouged.

4 (below left) Wall frieze from the

tomb of Nebamun, Thebes,
illustrates the elaborate hair styles
(most probably wigs) of ancient
Egyptian society. The eyes are
painted in the distinctive fashion to
resemble the sacred eye of Re.

5 (below right) The head of

Ashurnasirpal, King of Nimrud.
The stylised treatment of the hair
and beard nevertheless indicates the
employment of artificial curling
devices. The use of eye-paint is
similar to that of ancient Egypt.
 treatise on alchemy. However, her cure for baldness is of a
somewhat dubious nature: ‘For bald patches, powder red
sulphuret of arsenic and take it up with oak gum, as much as it
will bear. Put on a rag and apply, having soaped the place well
first. I have mixed the above with foam of nitre and it worked
well.’ (Galen.) Although baldness was desirable during many
stages of Egyptian civilisation, at the much later date of
Cleopatra’s reign, hair was once more in fashion.
The sophistication of Egyptian cosmetics was only eclipsed by
the advanced design of the beauty equipment. Mirrors of
polished metal have been discovered in tombs dating from the
sixth dynasty, about 2800 bc, and kohl vases of glass which
date from 1500 bc. Queen Hetepheres, the mother of the
Pharaoh who was reputed to have built the great pyramid of
Giza, was provided for her after-life with thirty alabaster
cosmetic vessels and a beautiful toilet box of eight inscribed
alabaster jars, plus a whole range of toilet implements in gold,
copper and flint. Exquisite cosmetic containers were found in
the tomb of Tutankhamun, including a make-up chest in cedar
and ivory inlaid with black pigments, plated in silver and gold
and decorated with magical symbols. An unusually beautiful
mirror box was also discovered, designed in the shape of the
ankh symbol of life and plated in gold with a silver edging.
Alternative containers included an ebony chest for antimony
powder and a selection of beautifully fashioned alabaster jars
which were still haunted with the elusive fragrance of unguents
dating from about 1350 bc. Other tomb excavations have
yielded a wealth of cosmetic implements, such as manicure tools
and razors, made of gold.
The Egyptians were known throughout the ancient world for
their cosmetic skills. Trade with Egypt introduced paint and
perfume to many Middle Eastern peoples, among them the
Hebrews. There is no evidence of the use of aromatics in Israel
until after Abram’s journey to Egypt, described in the Book of
 THE ARTIFICIAL FACE

Genesis, although it is obvious that Semitic tribes imported

aromatics and spices into the Nile valley. ‘And they sat down to
eat bread: and they lifted up their eyes and looked, and,
behold, a company of Ishmaelites came from Gilead with their
camels bearing spicery, and balm and myrrh, going to carry it
down to Egypt.’ (Genesis 37:25.)
After the introduction of aromatics into Israel through
Egypt, the Hebrew people evidently acquired a taste for perfume
as there are repeated references to scent in the Bible. In the
Book of Exodus (25:6), the description of religious ceremonial
relating to the Holy Tabernacle alludes to the use of spiced oils
and incense as an essential part of the holy ritual: ‘Oil for the
light, spices for anointing oil, and for sweet incense’; and in the
beautiful Song of Solomon there are many references to the
aesthetic qualities of perfume used in a purely secular context.
While the King sitteth at his table my Spikenard sendeth forth the
smell thereof. A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he
shall lie all night betwixt my breasts. My beloved is unto me as a
cluster of camphire in the vineyards of En-ge-di.
(1:12,13, 14)
Cosmetics were also employed by many Hebrew women to
enhance their looks, although this practice was not generally
approved by Jewish prophets and a puritan element in Hebrew
society. ‘And when thou art spoiled, what wilt thou do ? though
thou clothest thyself with crimson, though thou deckedst thee
with ornaments of gold, though thou rentest thy face with paint-
ing, in vain shalt thou make thyself fair; thy lovers will
despise thee, they will seek thy life.’ (Jeremiah 4:30.)
The most famous ‘painted’ woman in the Bible is undoubtedly
Jezebel, who adorned her face with cosmetic paints and drama-
tised her eyes with the use of kohl in order to appear seductive:
‘And when Jehu was come to Jezebel, Jezebel heard of it; and
she painted her face, and tired her head, and looked out at a
window.’ (Kings 9:30.)
 Apart from the influence of Egyptian cosmetic devices on
Hebrew women, the neighbouring Mesopotamian cultures also
employed the use of paints and perfumes, and as the Jewish
people were in contact with these civilisations it is likely that
they were influenced by the Babylonian and Assyrian mode of
dress and self-decoration.
The Mesopotamian peoples shared a basic similarity in
appearance. Their exotic clothing emphasised the sultry beauty
of their dark skins and the proud hawk-like features of men and
women were enhanced by a luxuriant growth of blue-black
hair. Unlike the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians of both
sexes grew their hair to nearly waist length, after which it was
elaborately dressed and artificially curled into extravagant
styles. Women coiled their locks into a chignon, and men
dressed their hair in a similar fashion with two braided tresses
crossing underneath the chignon and fastening over the fore-
head. Beards were tightly curled into numerous shell-like whorls
and were frequently interwoven with gold thread (Plate 5). Both
sexes dressed their locks with aromatic oils, scented them with
perfume and, if a variation in colour was desired, used dyes
made from cedar oil, alum and anthemis.
Facial cosmetics were also used by the Mesopotamians. One
of the earliest examples of lip salve was discovered during the
excavation of Ur, capital city of the Chaldeans. This cosmetic
was prepared from a base of white lead and dates back to
approximately 3500 bc. Self-decoration also extended to the
eyes which were accentuated with paints and the brows trimmed
with tweezers. Medical care of the eyes was provided by medi-
cinal ointments which were known to have been manufactured
by the ancient Assyrians.
These people of antiquity rivalled the Egyptians in their
liberal use of scent and the production of aromatic substances
was one of the most important chemical industries in ancient
Mesopotamia. The equipment used to produce aromatics was
 THE ARTIFICIAL FACE

highly developed and closely resembled the intricate collection

of technical implements employed in alchemy. Perfumes and
incense were employed for the same purposes as in Egypt, and
scent played a vital part in religious ritual, medicine and the
manufacturing of cosmetics. Vast quantities of perfumed
incense were used in ceremonials and Herodotus states that, at
the Temple of Baal in Babylon, ‘. . . on the greater altar the
Chaldeans even offer a thousand talents’ weight of frankincense
yearly, when they keep the festival of this god’. Scented sesame
oil and honey were also used in the embalming of corpses.
Relating to the everyday use of aromatics, the Mesopotamians
anointed themselves with sweetened oil extracted from animal
fats and vegetable substances, which were perfumed with exotic
scents and spices; ‘their hair is worn long, and covered with
caps, the whole body is perfumed’ (Herodotus). Scented oil was
also used as a cleansing preparation, for Mesopotamians, like
Egyptians, put personal cleanliness high on their list of desirable
qualities. Various aromatic plants were also employed as skin
cleansers, including tamarisk, the date palm and pine cones.
‘May the tamarisk, whereof the tops grow high, cleanse me;
may the date palm, which faces every wind, free me; may
mastakl plant, which fills the earth, clean me; may the pine
cone, which is full of seed corns, free me.’ (Akkadian text
seventh century bc.) Rue, and potash made from wood ash and
soda were other cleansing agents employed in personal hygiene.
‘With water I bathed myself. With soda, I cleansed myself. With
soda from a shiny basin I purified myself. With the dress of
heavenly kingship I clothed myself.’ (Sumerian text.) But soap
was only used for medicinal purposes and was manufactured
from vegetable extracts and oils.
The similarity in their aesthetic attitude to hygiene, combined
with their sophisticated use of cosmetics and perfume, allows
one to assess collectively the habits of these Middle Eastern
civilisations in regard to beauty. There is no doubt that these
men and women of antiquity created an atmosphere of mystique
around the toilet. Their highly developed use of face paints
and perfumery set the example for a beauty routine which
was followed throughout the ancient world for centuries to
come.
 CHAPTER THREE

Cosmetics in Antiquity:
Greece and Rome

First she washed all impurity from her desirable person with
ambrosia, and anointed herself with rich oil, ambrosial and agree-
able, which was odoriferous to her; and the odour of which, when
shaken in the brass-founded mansion of Zeus reached even to the
earth and to heaven. With this having anointed her body and combed
her hair, she arranged with her hands her bright locks, beautiful,
ambrosial which flowed from her immortal head (Hera’s toilet from
the Iliad of Homer, translated by C. W. Bateman and R. Mongan)

The ancient Greeks had a more refined approach to cosmetic

arts than the early Middle Eastern cultures. The rarified
atmosphere of Greece, which encouraged clarity of thought
and simple beauty and elegance in the design of architecture
and sculpture, contributed to a certain restraint in self-
decoration. This refinement is clearly seen in the simplicity of
clothing with its sparing use of bright colours and is echoed
again in the comparatively light use of cosmetic paints.
The Grecian woman in many cases used no facial make-up,
but if she wished to enhance her looks with cosmetics she
coloured her cheeks and lips with a vegetable dye made from
a root named polderos which was similar to alkanet. On the
other hand, the Greek courtesans, or hetaerae, employed lavish
make-up as a mark of their trade in seduction. A bright rouge
Fig 4 Wooden box for cosmetics in the shape of a swimming duck, Greek
or Roman
was applied to their cheeks; their faces were whitened with
white lead powder, and their eyes outlined with kohl {Plate 6).
A direct comparison in the use of cosmetics by women can
be made between the Greeks and the more anciently established
civilisation on Crete. The Minoan people, whose culture was
in many ways strangely out of context in the Aegean, enjoyed
a liberal Middle Eastern attitude to cosmetics and perfumery.
Both sexes used oils and aromatics to scent their bodies and
on ceremonial occasions adorned themselves with wreaths of
sweet scented flowers. Bathrooms were sophisticated in design
and lavishly decorated with painted motifs frequently based on
marine life. This Minoan talent for decorative art extended to
superb frescoes depicting Cretan society. These exquisite small-
boned people, with their coiled locks of shining ebony hair,
their piquant features and vital sensuality, possessed blanched
white skins and large black-rimmed eyes, which in the case of
women, and possibly men, indicates their use of kohl and other
cosmetic paints.
The reason why Greek women used few cosmetics was
possibly due to the masculine orientation of Grecian society.
 The Greek man did not wish his wife to be a seductress—he
could employ a courtesan for this purpose; he was only con-
cerned with her attributes as a good housewife and mother.
Unlike the Egyptian woman, a Grecian lady had little inde-
pendence and fulfilled a very limited role in society.
The restriction in cosmetic artifice did not, however, extend
to the hair. Dyes were frequently employed to change hair
colour and these were made from such ingredients as yellow
flower petals, potassium solutions and various dye powders.
Hair styles emulated the basic simplicity in dress and the
women’s long tresses were usually swept up on top of the head
and fastened with ribbons or metal bands, or contained in a
kind of snood (Plate 7). However, by the time of Alexander the
Great (and after the Roman conquest of Greece), hairstyles
had become more elaborate and involved the use of false hair
which was frizzed, curled and held in place with a diadem or
tiara.
Masculine hairstyles changed with the course of Greek
history. In pre-Hellenic times men wore their hair long and
were bearded, but by the middle of the fifth century bc it
became general to crop hair short and to shave the face. Beards,
however, were still worn by old men and in particular philo-
sophers, who used them as a symbol of their freedom from
worldly sophistications. Alexander the Great set his seal on
the fashion for being clean-shaven, as it was one of the idio-
syncrasies of this remarkable soldier to shave his beard even
during long and arduous military campaigns.
Shaving the face was an example of the aesthetic attitude to
personal hygiene which the ancient Greeks shared with the
Middle Eastern cultures. Bathing formed an essential part of
the daily toilet and aromatic oils and perfumes were also
employed, although these were mainly considered a feminine
aid to beauty.
Perfume in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia had almost
 sinister connections with embalming and pagan ceremonial, but
the Greeks provided a lighter touch of magic to the mystique
of scent. In Greek mythology Aphrodite (Venus) was supposed
to have invented perfume and her secret recipe was related to
mankind by Aenone, a handmaiden. Helen of Troy was reputed
to have emulated Aphrodite in her use of scent and this was
offered as one of the reasons for her extraordinary power of
attracting men. Legend and myth notwithstanding, Greek
women made liberal use of aromatics and the composition of
these perfumes is described in the contemporary writings of
Theophrastus. Born in 370 bc his principal work involved a
detailed classification of Greek plant life, but he also devoted
much of his time to writing on aromatics.
Perfumes are compounded from various parts of the plants: flowers,
leaves, twigs, root, wood, fruit and gum; and in most cases the
perfume is made from a mixture of several parts. Rose and gilli-
flower perfumes are made from the flowers: so also is the perfume
called Susinon, this too being made from flowers, namely lilies:
also the perfumes named from bergamot mint and tufted thyme,
kypros, and also the saffron perfume. The crocus which produces
this is best in Aegina and Cilicia. Instances of those made from
leaves are the perfumes called from myrtle and dropwort: this grows
in Cyprus on the hills and is very fragrant: that which grows in
Hellas yields no perfume, being scentless . . . from roots are made
the perfumes named from iris, spikenard, and sweet marjoram, an
ingredient in which is Koston; for it is the root to which this perfume
is applied. The Eretrian unguent is made from the root of Kypeiron,
which is obtained from Cyclades as well as Enboea. From wood is
made what is called ‘palm perfume’ for they put in what is called the
‘spathe’, having first dried it. From fruits are made the quince
perfume, the myrtle and the bay. The ‘Egyptian’ is made from
several ingredients including cinnamon and myrrh.
(Theophrastus. Enquiry into Plants translated by Sir Arthur Hort)

The natural aromatic ingredients for perfumes were manu-

factured into a finished product through the arts of the
perfumer who still relied on an oil base for many of his scents.
Theophrastus mentions the use of Egyptian or Syrian ‘balanos’
oil for this purpose although olive oil was also popular. The
‘staying power’ of these early perfumes depended in part on
the tenacity of the oil but also relied on the strength of the
natural scent.
The lightest are rose-perfume and kypros, which seem to be the
best suited to men, as also is lily-perfume. The best for women are
myrrh oil, megalion, the Egyptian, sweet marjoram, and spikenard:
for these owing to their strength and substantial nature do not
easily evaporate and are not easily made to disperse, and a lasting
perfume is what women require.
(Enquiry into Plants)

The Romans learnt the art of perfumery from the Greek

settlements in southern Italy and, through the conquest of
Greece, came into contact with other civilised refinements of
the toilet. They absorbed Greek ideas on cosmetic care in the
same way as, on a higher plane, they absorbed every aspect of
Greek culture and made it part of their own way of life.
The growth of the Roman Empire through conquest and
subjugation resulted in the establishment of colonies united to
Rome by a highly efficient communication system. Extensive
imports of foreign goods into the city provided its inhabitants
with an enormous range of material amenities, including such
luxuries as beauty preparations. Perfumes and unguents were
acquired from Egypt and in particular from the famous cosmetic
centre of Mendes, whilst the cropped flaxen locks of subju-
gated Gaulish tribes were imported into Rome to manufacture
wigs for wealthy ladies of society.
According to Pliny, the long hair of the Gauls led their
country to be nicknamed ‘Gallia Comata’, or ‘Hairy Gaul’,
and Julius Caesar is reputed to have forced them to cut off
their hair as a sign of submission to Roman rule. The truth of
this story may be open to doubt, but as blonde wigs were an
essential fashion item in ancient Rome the main source of
hair was undoubtedly Gaul. The early Christian church made
a determined effort to stamp out the fashion for wigs and at
this time false flaxen hair was the sign of a prostitute. Roman
wigs were never designed to look realistic but were crimped
and frizzed with curling irons, after which they were elaborately
decorated with ribbons, flowers or ornate jewellery. Natural hair
was given the same decorative treatment as wigs and was
dressed into a variety of styles. At one stage in Roman history,
sculpture portraits of Roman society ladies were executed with
detachable hairstyles so that the portrait subject could keep
pace with the rapid changes of fashion.
Hair dyes were also in general use by Roman women. They
often used recipes for bleaching acquired from the Gauls who
made a practice of accentuating their flaxen hair colour by this
means. The ingredients for these bleaches included soap com-
pounds of beechwood ash and goat tallow, but unfortunately,
as Roman hair did not possess the coarse strength and quality
of Germanic locks, bleaching frequently resulted in loss of
hair or even baldness. Ovid’s plaintive lament to his mistress,
Corinna, may well have been echoed by other Roman lovers:
‘Did I not say to thee, “Cease to dye thy hair?” And now thou
hast no longer any hair to dye. Nevertheless, hadst thou not
been stubborn, where was there anything more beautiful than
thy hair? . . . Now Germany will send you some slave-girl’s
hair; a vanquished nation shall furnish thy adornments.’
(Ovid. Ars Amaloria.) However, fashion prevailed and women
continued to employ the use of dyes.
The poor condition of the Roman woman’s hair encouraged
the creation of ‘conditioning’ creams to restore tresses to their
original beauty. These pomades were made from such ingre-
dients as sheep or bear’s grease and marrow extracted from
deer bones, whilst extreme remedies included compounds of
hellibore and pepper mixed with rat’s heads and excrement.
The dubious restorative powers of these ointments had little
Fig 5 Ivory comb carved with the owner’s name, ‘Modestina’. No
explanation has been offered for the letters ‘VHEF’, Roman

effect, and clever hairdressing or the use of a wig was needed

to disguise diminished locks. The wealthy society lady was
provided with this service by her ornatrix, a skilled handmaiden
who apart from caring for her mistress’s hair also presided
over the rest of her toilet.
The Roman lady began her day by having her night cream,
made from a compound of flour and milk, washed off her face
by a slave girl, who would use water scented with perfume
essence for this purpose. A goblet of clean water was then
brought so that she might rinse her mouth, after which she
cleaned her teeth with a toothbrush and dentifrice concocted
from powdered horn, pumice stone, or a mixture of burnt
potassium or sodium carbonate. Society women who were
unable to retain their natural teeth in good condition either
employed a dentist to repair the damage with gold, or wore
false teeth made from ivory, bone or a cement compound.
Next came a bath, and this involved a long period of soaking
in perfumed water followed by a massage and rub down with
scented oils. Superfluous hair was removed with razors, pumice
 Fig 6 (left) rock crystal miniature vase for cosmetics,
Roman; (right) carved ivory pot for cosmetics, Roman,
third century ad

stones or depilatory creams made from medicinal drugs such

as bryonia.
After her bath, the Roman lady would have repaired to her
boudoir where the ornatrix was waiting, with a range of
cosmetic paints and implements, to complete the final stage
of her mistress’s toilet. The dressing table was covered with
elegant caskets, boxes, beautifully fashioned cosmetic jars,
scissors, files, ivory curry combs, or stirgilis, used to remove
skin impurities after bathing, and polished copper, silver and
even glass hand mirrors, the latter being mounted on lead
{Plate 8). The ornatrix first turned her attention to her mistress’s
hair which was combed with boxwood, ivory or tortoiseshell
combs, crimped with curling irons and dressed into shape.
Then, the face and arms were painted with chalk or white lead
powder, whilst lips and cheeks were rouged with a dye made
from red ochre or wine dregs. The eyes were accentuated with
Egyptian kohl, powdered ash or saffron; lashes were darkened
with burnt cork, and eyebrows neatly plucked with tweezers.
The effect of all this cosmetic elaboration was frequently
overstated and many Romans criticised women for their exces-
sive use of artifice: ‘Artifice is a fine thing when it’s not per-
ceived’ and ‘the art that adorns you should be unsuspected.
Who but would feel a sensation of disgust if the paint on your
face were so thick that it oozed down on your breasts ?’ (Ovid.
Ars Amatoria.) For this reason Ovid warned Roman lovers that
an unexpected visit to their mistresses’ boudoirs might upset

Fig 7 Clay rouge pot discovered at Naucratis still

containing traces of rouge, fourth century bc
their image of natural feminine beauty. ‘You’ll find she’s got
boxes containing concoctions of all colours of the rainbow,
and you’ll see the paint trickling down in warm streams on to
her breasts. The whole place stinks like Phineus’ dinner-table,
and I’ve often felt as if I was going to be sick.’ (Ars Amatoria.)
Roman men, however, themselves used a large range of
cosmetic preparations and many of these concotions were
employed by the barber, or tonsor, as part of his after-shave
treatment. The Roman who did not possess a skilled servant
to shave his beard started the day with a visit to the barber’s
shop, and in some cases this system was preferred as these
establishments were great centres for gossip. The tonsor
required considerable skill, as the Roman razor, or novacula,
was made of iron which quickly corroded, became blunt and
as a result cut and gashed the face. To repair the damage,
plasters made from spiders’ webs soaked in oil and vinegar were
applied and perfumed ointments were used to soothe the skin.
Blemishes were also disguised by small ‘patches’ of material
known as splenia lunata. As an alternative to shaving, there
were depilatories made from such ingredients as resin, pitch,
white vine or ivy gum extracts, ass’s fat, she-goat’s gall, bat’s
blood and powdered viper. If these drastic remedies proved
ineffective, many men followed the example of Julius Caesar
who had his facial hairs individually plucked out with tweezers.
Scipio Africanus had set the mode for being clean-shaven;
no doubt his fame as the conqueror of Hannibal led to this
fashion being generally adopted. The first shave of a youth
came to be regarded as the arrival of masculine adulthood and
was offered as a token to his favourite god. Perhaps because of
this connection with masculinity, the clean-shaven look per-
sisted until the reign of the Emperor Hadrian who grew a
beard, reputedly to hide a bad skin, after which this fashion
was followed by many Romans.
Hadrian and Nero, during their separate reigns, set a vogue
 for artificially curled hairstyles for men, although these were
mainly popular with dandies who also dyed and scented their
hair with cassia and cinnamon perfumes. A general trend in
male vanity, however, encouraged the fashion for wigs, as many
Romans became prematurely bald and required a disguise for
this defect. Caligula is supposed to have worn a wig to hide
his identity whilst prowling around the brothels of ancient
Rome, and Caracalla wore a blonde wig to ingratiate himself
with Germanic tribesmen during a visit to their settlement.
Another aspect of the male toilet which was of prime import-
ance to the Roman man, for social as well as cosmetic reasons,
was his daily sojourn to the baths of the city. These were
equipped with gymnasia, libraries and beautiful gardens in addi-
tion to the ornately decorated marble baths. There was a cold
room, frigidarium‫׳‬, warm room, tepidarium‫׳‬, and hot room,
calidarium, which operated on the Turkish principle of hot
water and steam baths; and an extra hot room, laconicum, for
medicinal treatments. Private villas contained their own superb
baths:
From thence you enter into the grand and spacious cooling-room
belonging to the baths, from the opposite walls of which two curved
basins are thrown out, so to speak; these are large enough, if you
consider that the sea is close by. Contiguous to this is the anointing-
room, then the sweating room and beyond that the furnace; adjoin-
ing are two other little bathing-rooms which are fitted up in an
elegant rather than costly manner. (The epistles of Pliny translated
by William Melmoth)

The sheer luxury of life in ancient Rome with its emphasis

on comfort and leisure and its enjoyment of beauty and fashion,
is reflected in the ritual of the toilet. Both sexes devoted several
hours a day to the care of their bodies and the embellishment
of their faces by cosmetic means. Roman ingenuity in design
was evident in the manufacture of every form of toilet imple-
ment: the standard of perfection attained in major works of
6 (above left) Moulded head vase. Greek, c A'lO bc. Greek courtesans would have painted their
faces in the fashion illustrated on this unusual vase. Kohl and lip rouge were also commonly
used by Roman society ladies.
7 (below) Clay drinking cup. Greek, 490-80 bc. Greek styles of hairdressing are illustrated
by these figures; the one seated has elaborately curled ringlets.
8 (above right) Bronze folding mirror. Etruscan, 200 bc. A fine example of the type of beauti-
fully worked toilet implement used in ancient Rome.
 9 (left) A lady at her
toilet. Fourteenth century.
The double-sided comb
is similar to the one
illustrated in Fig 9 (p 61).

10 (right) Medieval
perfumer’s shop. On the
counter, the mirrors are
illustrated with faces to
simulate reflections.

11 (left) A lady bathing.

Public bath-houses similar
to those of ancient Rome
were re-introduced to
England after the Crusades.
Individual baths were also
taken, often involving an
eccentric assortment of
apparatus (see quotation
from the Boke of Nurture,
pp 62 3).
 COSMETICS IN ANTIQUITY

art is seen again in beautifully fashioned‘boxes, caskets and other

cosmetic containers. In their attitude to hygiene and their use
of perfumery and beauty preparations, the Romans set a
standard of civilised elegance which can scarcely be rivalled by
any other culture.
 PART TWO

A History of Cosmetics
in England
 CHAPTER FOUR

Early Britain and the

Middle Ages

Faire is lady in hire hour;

And so is knyght in his armure
(Attributed to Adam Davie. 4The Marchal of Stratford atte Bowe’,
King Alisaunder)

The sophistication of the great Middle Eastern and Mediter-

ranean cultures, with their eminently refined approach to
living and highly developed appreciation of art and beauty,
found no parallel in the wildly rugged island of Britain which
at a later period in history was still isolated from the worldly
influences of these civilisations.
The grey windswept hills and thick forests haunted by
wolves and wild boar offered little potential accommodation for
humans and the inclement weather was a constant barrier to
human comfort. The Celtic nomads who had settled on the
island were as savage and wildlooking as the land which they
chose to inhabit. They were clad in animal skins and their thick
long hair was dyed red in a mixture of water boiled with lime,
whilst their bodies were patterned with painted designs. The
word Pict comes from Picti, meaning ‘painted’, and was an apt
description of people who covered themselves in coloured
images of birds and animals. This habit had little to do with
‘cosmetic’ embellishment, but was a means of establishing a
 THE ARTIFICIAL FACE

tribal identity and, within the tribal unit, of distinguishing

social rank. A chieftain might paint himself with large elaborate
designs whereas men of a humbler social order had to be
content with a small single motif. During the Roman occu-
pation, when the ancient Britons adopted conventional clothes,
they transferred the painted designs of birds and animals from
their bodies to their shields, and eventually these images formed
the basis for heraldic devices.
Although the wild appearance of the ancient Britons might
have indicated otherwise, a developed form of social organisa-
tion and culture existed before the Roman conquest. The
Druids, despite their reputation for witchcraft and paganism,
had a controlling and civilising influence on the Celtic people
and were renowned for their prowess in primitive medicine.
Through their skill with herbs, they concocted the closest
parallel to cosmetics at this period in the form of herbal oint-
ments, which they reputedly imbued with magical powers to
cure wounds or enhance beauty. Perfume, as such, was un-
known in pre-Roman Britain, but the Druids were not
insensible to the beauty of fragrance and employed the use of
aromatic herbs. On ceremonial occasions, Druidesses wreathed
their heads in crowns of verbena which apart from its sweet
scent was a particularly magical plant according to Druid
herbal lore.
During the several hundred years of Britain’s colonisation
by Rome the aspect of the island and its people changed
radically. The untamed country was cultivated, roads were con-
structed and towns were built. The dark and mystic Celtic
culture was replaced by a highly developed and complex
civilisation which offered comfort, and even luxury. The Celts
adopted an approximation of Roman dress and, at a more
sophisticated level, the cosmetics and perfumes of their
conquerors.
The departure of the Romans in ad 429 had little immediate
 Fig 8 Bronze mirror found at Desborough,
Northamptonshire, first century ad

effect on the Briton’s way of life which remained essentially

Roman, but during the course of time the island was subjected
to repeated invasions by barbaric Teutonic tribes. Then,
although the Roman influence remained strong, invasions by
Angles, Saxons and Jutes over a long period gradually changed
the existing culture. These German tribes reintroduced body
painting to Britain, covering themselves in blue ‘woad’ tattooed
designs and, like the Celts before the Roman Conquest, they
dyed their long hair red or bleached it to a paler shade of flaxen
blonde.
The Nordic invaders made a particular fetish of their hair.
Men cultivated luxuriant beards and both sexes wore their hair
long. Much time and attention was devoted to grooming it to
their satisfaction, and the elaborate combs and pins found in
Teutonic tombs are evidence of the interest in this aspect of
their appearance. The Danes were renowned for their excep-
tional wealth of hair, and the male courtiers of King Canute
were reputed to have waist-length hair which they groomed and
combed at least once every day.
The Teutonic influence erased many of the refinements
enjoyed by the Romanised Briton. To these changes the early
Christian church made its contribution. The Christian mission-
aries declared that bathing was an evil, ungodly vanity and thus
the newly Christian Britons rejected the Roman custom of
taking baths. Early Christians who wore wigs were even
excommunicated by the church for this attempt at self-
improvement.
The cosmetics and perfumes of Roman Britain had also dis-
appeared and contemporary records illustrate a return to
herbal potions and ointments which were used in lieu of
cosmetic preparations:
For an eye salve, take aloes and zedoary, laurel berries and pepper,
shave them small, and lay fresh cow’s butter in water, then take
a broad whetstone and rub the butter on the whetstone with copper
so that it may be pretty rough, then add some part of the worts
thereto, then put the paste into a brass vessel, let it stand for nine
days, and let some one turn it every day; afterwards melt it in the
same brass vessel, strain it through a cloth, afterwards put it into
whatever vessel thou wilt, use it when need be. This salve is good
for infirmity of every sort which aileth the eyes. (Leechdoms,
Wortcunning and Starcraft. A collection of Anglo-Saxon docu-
ments edited by Rev Oswald Cockayne)
 Due to a rough, out of doors life the Anglo-Saxons appear
to have suffered greatly from chapped hands as there are
numerous ‘hand creams’ to be found among contemporary
recipes:
To Protect Peeling or Sore Hands
Take a hand full of beet and a hand full of lettuce and a hand
full of coriander, and pound all together; then take crumbs, and
put them into water, and the worts with them, and then warm the
worts well in the water and the crumbs with it; then work up a
poultice thereof and bind upon the hands for one night, and do
this as long as need may be (Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft)

Yet another 6hand cream’ includes lily of the valley as an

ingredient: 6For sore of hands, take this same wort Apollinaris,
pound it with old lard without salt, add thereto a cup of old
wine, and let that be heated without smoke, and of the lard
let there be by weight of one pound; pound together in the
manner which thou mightest work a plaister, and lay to the
hand.’ (Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft,} Apart from
their soothing and healing properties, the Saxons believed, as
the Druids had before them, that herbs contained magical
powers. Individual plants were used for particular purposes;
thus lily of the valley was good for the hands and foxgloves or
mint were used in recipes to purge the skin of spots.
These Saxon recipes are the only example of 6cosmetic’ care
at this period, but there is evidence of perfume being introduced
to Britain during the reign of King Ethelstan. The king’s sister
was courted by Hugh, King of the Franks, and his ambassador
brings amongst other gifts for the Saxon princess 6perfumes
such as never had been seen in England before’. {Chronicles of
William of Malmesbury?)
In 1066 William of Normandy invaded England and defeated
Harold, the Saxon king, at Hastings. The Saxon spies sent out
before the battle to assess the enemy’s strength are reputed to
have returned with reports of having seen an army of ‘priests’
and not soldiers. This misconception arose from the fact that
the Normans were all clean shaven and their hair was shaved
off from the back of the head in an exaggerated ‘short back and
sides’ style which gave them a monk-like appearance. It is
strange that Harold’s spies were misled by a cropped hair cut
as, according to William of Malmesbury’s description, the
Saxons also favoured a shorter hairstyle at this period: ‘The
English at that time wore short garments reaching to the mid-
knee; they had their hair cropped, their beards shaven, their
arms laden with golden bracelets, their skin adorned with
punctured designs’.
The Norman influence in England added refinement to the
Saxon way of life. Norman French manners, customs and
fashions had been previously introduced to the English court
during the reign of Edward the Confessor, but after the
Norman conquest the French style of living was more generally
adopted by the Saxon nobility. The contemporary English
appearance was also affected by the Norman influence. The
‘priest’s’ hairstyle became fashionable with the Saxon aristo-
cracy and the barbaric habit of tattooing the body less common.
Cosmetics were obviously not among the innovations intro-
duced by the invaders since, after the conquest, Saxon women’s
faces remained as untouched as ever by artificial colouring.
The Englishwoman’s vanity was denied any scope whatsoever
by the new Norman fashion for concealing feminine tresses
under a kerchief. The Saxon matron, according to Teutonic
custom, had taken a particular pride in displaying her long,
braided hair, but now only young girls were permitted to con-
tinue with this tradition. However, during the reign of Henry I,
his Saxon queen, Matilda, revived the old Germanic fashion by
allowing her hair to remain flowing and loose. Men, it seems,
were encouraged by this feminine example and also grew their
hair long. ‘They vied with women in length of locks, and
 EARLY BRITAIN AND THE MIDDLE AGES

wherever they were defective, put on false tresses, forgetful, or

rather ignorant, of the saying of the apostle, if a man nurtures
his hair it is a shame on him.’ {Chronicles of William of
Malmesbury?) The early twelfth-century man’s use of false
locks to supplement his own hair illustrates the importance of
this aspect of his toilet. Handsome forked beards, somewhat
Assyrian in style, were also fashionable at this time; these were
groomed into shape and dressed with wax.
The attitude of ecclesiastics, judging from William of
Malmesbury’s condemnation of male vanity, was totally against
any form of adornment or self-decoration; it is ironical, there-
fore, that a movement inspired by contemporary religious
ideals should have been responsible for the introduction of
cosmetics to Europe. The Crusades, which introduced European
men to the luxuries of Middle Eastern life, had a profound
effect on the dress, toilet and customs of the Middle Ages.
European men were inspired to leave their own countries on
a quest which owed as much to a desire for change and the
excitement of battle as to religious or spiritual involvement.
Mixed motives were also responsible for the women’s crusade
led by Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of King Louis of France.
Aristocratic Frenchwomen, it seems, were unwilling to allow
their husbands to abandon them to a long period of chastity,
and promises of infidelity on their part threatened to disrupt
a crusade led by the French king. Queen Eleanor, who later
divorced Louis and married Henry II of England, decided to
organise these female rebels into a women’s army. Wearing
crusader uniforms, they would follow the men on their spiritual
journey offering them the comforts of home life during the
crusade. The Church frowned on this feminine escapade, and
with good reason, for the noblewomen’s example encouraged
a motley selection of female camp followers to join the Crusades.
Religious men believed that these women were largely respon-
sible for the degeneration of the Second Crusade as reports
reached Europe of gay orgies round camp fires, where trouba-
dours abandoned their lyrical serenades for bawdy alehouse
songs, and of European women covering their faces with
Eastern cosmetics before a battle so that they would attract the
Saracens should the crusaders suffer defeat.
The medieval Church’s lack of confidence in female morality
may have resulted in an exaggeration of these stories regarding
the use of cosmetics by camp followers, but it is a fact that
Eastern cosmetic materials and toilet articles were introduced
to European crusaders during their time in the Middle East.
The contemporary eyewitness reports of the Crusades record
the overwhelming impression that Eastern luxuries made on
the crusading knight. Apart from acquiring his share of the
priceless booty from ambushed Turkish and Saracen caravans,
the crusader also developed a taste for the comparatively easy
luxury of Eastern living. It is therefore hardly surprising that
the crusaders brought back many commodities and customs
which had delighted them in the Holy Land (Plate 9).
Apart from cosmetic preparations, the crusaders returned
home with aromatics and perfumes (Plate 10). During the later
Crusades, Richard I, son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine,
had conquered Cyprus, and the perfume ‘Eau de Chypre’,
which takes its name from the island, was introduced to
Europe at this period. In the fourteenth century oyselets de
chypre were made from a mixture compounded into a paste
and shaped like little birds, which were then burnt to allow
the aroma of scent to escape and sweeten the air. Crusaders
also returned to Europe with the recipe for rose-water and
introduced the Eastern custom of offering bowls of rose-
water to guests after a banquet. Entranced by the sweetly
scented flowers they had seen in the Middle East, the crusaders
brought home many of these floral plants, including the lily
which became one of the emblems of romantic chivalry.
English knights also introduced to England the Saracen bride’s
custom of wearing an orange blossom wreath on her wedding
day.
The Eastern influence became apparent in costume and
hairstyles. Men wore turban-shaped hats and elaborate hoods,
whilst their hair was cut short in the fashion adopted during
the Crusades when long hairstyles had proved impractical in
the hot climate of the Holy Land. Women’s headdresses
became ornate and the Eastern love of extravagance seems to
have continued as an influence in female headgear during the
course of the Middle Ages. Styles varied from a simple veil or
wimple to vast edifices resembling towers, winged birds and
butterflies. Although women’s hair during the late Middle Ages
was usually hidden under a headdress, it made an occasional
appearance in ornate gold hair nets known as ‘crespines’ and
gilded latticework pads described as ‘templars’. Tubes of silk
entwined with gold cord bound long plaits which were supple-
mented with false hair to extend their length to below the
waist.
English crusaders re-introduced bathing to England and
public baths similar to those of ancient Rome were built in
many large towns. The knights had no doubt enjoyed the
Middle Eastern style of bathing in the Eloly Land and the
design of medieval bath-houses copied the basic principles of a
Turkish bath, with special sweating rooms and hot water or
steam baths which were produced by dropping heated stones
into water. Bathing was mixed, a fact which must have dis-
pleased contemporary churchmen. It is unlikely that the public
baths were used on any regular basis; cleanliness was probably
a secondary consideration compared with the therapeutic
effects of heat and warmth in a cold climate, and the addi-
tional attraction of massage facilities which were provided by
some bath-houses. English lords, who preferred bathing in the
privacy of their castles or manor houses, trained their ‘chamber-
lains’ to prepare a bath; from contemporary description, this
combined an Eastern use of aromatics with an attempt at re-
creating the comfort and luxury enjoyed by the crusaders
when in the East {Plate 11). The ‘bathroom’ was hung with
sheets containing aromatic herbs and sweet-scented flowers;
and sponges, placed on the floor, were covered by another
sheet. The lord could then sit in cushioned comfort whilst his
‘chamberlain’ or squire rinsed him down with perfumed water.

Hang shetis round about the rooff; do thus as y meene, every shete
full of flowres and herbis soote and grene, and looke ye have sponges
v or vj theron to sytte or lene:
 A basyn full in youre hand of herbis hote and fresche, and with a
soft sponge in hand, his body that ye wasche, Rynse hym with rose
water warme and feire uppon hym flasche.

(The Duties of a Chamberlain included in the

Boke of Nurture by John Russell, usher and Marshal
to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. Early fifteenth century)

This recipe illustrates the emphasis on therapy as opposed to

cleanliness and there is little doubt that this was the main
reason for bathing.
Apart from the influence on fashions and toilet, the Crusades
had introduced to European knights the Saracen tradition of
chivalry which was highly developed at this period. Moorish
warriors were trained to observe exacting standards of
behaviour in war or love, and their mode of conduct in either
situation was governed by set rules and principles. Their
lyrical minstrelsy of war and love, formal courtesy to ladies
and ritual etiquette were echoed in European romantic chivalry
which exerted its influence in England from the thirteenth
century until the end of the Middle Ages.
The chivalric attitude to love based on high romance and
courtly ritual put women on a pedestal, which contrasted
strangely with their actual status in medieval society. A woman
was a mere pawn used in marriage to gain power in some
political manoeuvre or to acquire property should she belong
to a wealthy family. The medieval view of female beauty was
restricted by women’s social status and by a stereotyped idea
of feminine perfection, as idealised in chivalric love poetry.
Female looks were standardised into a pale fair-haired pretti-
ness with no hint of individuality in character or appearance
to disturb its wan image (Plate 12).
One bizarre fashion which contributed to this uniformity of
facial beauty was that women, using tweezers, plucked all the
hair from their eyebrows, temples and necks (Plate 13). The
Fig 10 Ivory mirror case, the carving shows the storming of the Castle of
Love, German, c 1350-60

obvious excuse for this masochistic practice was to draw

attention to the elaborate headdresses worn at the time. The
true reason, however, was probably the desire to eliminate any
idiosyncratic faults and to simulate the perfect elongated oval
face which accorded with the contemporary ideal image.
The model medieval female face was always represented as
having small neat features and pale grey eyes. The complexion
was usually compared to the waxen whiteness of a lily enhanced
by rose-red tints on cheeks and lips, whilst the hair was fre-
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quently likened to spun gold. An excellent description of
medieval beauty appears in Chaucer’s version of The Romaunt
of the Rose\
Hir heer was as yelowe of hewe
As any basin scoured newe.
Hir flesh as tendre as is chike, [chicken]
With bente browes, smothe and slike;
And by mesure large were
the opening of hir yen [eyes] clere.
Hir nose of good proporcionn,
Hir yen greye as a faucoun [falcon]
With swete breeth and wel savoured,
Hir face whyt and wel coloured,
With litel mouth, and round to see;
A clove chin eek hadde she.
Another passage in this poem deals in lyrical terms with the
complexion:
Hir flesh was tendre as dewe of flour [flower]
Hir chere [appearance] was simple as byrde in bour;
As whyt as lilie or rose in rys
Hir face, gentil and tretys [graceful].
It is an interesting fact that the emblems of romantic
chivalry, the rose and lily, set the colour for complexions for
a period of several centuries. During the Middle Ages a white
skin was an essential feature of perfect beauty and the winged
veiling of contemporary headdresses served a useful purpose
in protecting complexions from sunburn. For the same reason,
gloves were always worn when out of doors.
And for to kepe hir hondes faire
Of gloves whyte she hadde a paire
(The Romaunt of the Rose)
Protection from the sun was one way to keep complexions
pale and fair, but there is evidence in France that make-up was
also used to enhance naturally white skin tones. The Crusades
 THE ARTIFICIAL FACE

had introduced Eastern cosmetics to the Continent, and French

sources mention the use of powder, rouge, hair colourants and
a variety of toilet implements, such as ear-pickers, toothpicks
and even tongue-scrapers. Apart from more elaborate cosmetic
ingredients, French beauty preparations contained basic natural
materials. Wheat powder, or blaunchet, was used to blanch the
face; hair was washed in ‘lye’, a mixture of wood ash and
water, and wine was incorporated into hair dyes. Bleaches were
also used by Frenchwomen to lighten their hair to a fashionable
saffron yellow.
There is little contemporary evidence of the employment of
these items of toiletry in England, but it can be reasonably
supposed that some English noblewomen followed the example
of French court ladies, for although France and England were
alienated by the Hundred Years War the English court was
still influenced by French fashions and customs. However, the
comparatively scanty information available would indicate that
English ladies on the whole employed fewer cosmetics than their
French counterparts.
Cosmetic materials were certainly available to Englishwomen
of the Middle Ages, as the Crusades had encouraged trade with
the East and the combined Guild of Pepperers and Spicers,
known as the Fraternity of St Anthony, imported quantities
of Arabian aromatic spices, oils, gum resins and perfumed
essences. The manufacture of these raw materials into facial
cosmetics would also have been possible at this period, as the
Arab science of alchemy had many followers in England and
English alchemists already treated the creation of perfumes as
their special preserve. Thomas Norton’s Ordinall of Alchemy
makes a particular reference to scent:
Pleasant odours ingendered be shall
Of Cleane and Pure substance and fumigale,
As it appeareth in Amber, Warde and Mirrhe,
Good for a Woman, Such things pleaseth her.
 While it appears that little use was made of the alchemists’
potential talent in the field of cosmetics, once the store of
Eastern toilet preparations brought home by crusader husbands
had been exhausted, the Englishwoman could rely on cosmetics
imported from the Continent or on home-made recipes for
beauty no doubt based on the herbal remedies of the Saxon
period.
Since availability was not the problem, it is reasonable to
assume that it was the attitude of the puritan element in the
medieval church that restrained Englishwomen from using
cosmetics. Ecclesiastical puritans totally condemned artificial
vanities as the devil’s evil influence on womankind. Aristocratic
French ladies may have partially ignored priestly tirades against
fashionable artifice, but Englishwomen accustomed to the
slightly less worldly environment of the English court were
more likely to have been deeply affected by the Church’s
condemnation. The Church wielded immense power over
medieval society and it is impossible to overemphasise the effect
of religious teachings on the contemporary mind. The Church
demanded absolute unity of belief in its narrow and literal
interpretation of the Bible, and this faith in the factual substance
of biblical texts led ecclesiastics to interpret as literal truth the
idea that man was fashioned in God’s image. The Church for
this reason believed that the use of cosmetics tampered with
man’s, and therefore God’s, image which was the most evil
of sins.
This puritan ecclesiastical attitude was upheld by many con-
temporary men and in Chaucer’s version of The Romaunt of
the Rose he personifies ‘Beautee’ as a woman who uses no
‘peynte’ and who leaves her brows unplucked. However, the
best written example of contemporary puritanism regarding
cosmetics and vanity is provided in The Book of the Knight of
La Tour Landry, which was translated from the French during
the reign of Henry VI. Geoffrey de la Tour Landry wrote his
 THE ARTIFICIAL FACE

book as a moral guide for his three motherless daughters. It

incorporates both contemporary religious and secular puritan
attitudes to vanity, emphasising the medieval belief that make-
up destroyed God’s image in womankind:

Whi sufficithe it not that God hathe formed man and woman
after hys owne shape, in the whiche the aungeles so moche delitithe
hem, for ioye to see God in the visage? For, and God wolde, hym
nedithe not to have made hem women, but dome bestis or serpentis.
Alas! whi take women none hede of the gret love that God hathe
yene hem, to make hem after his figure ?

The stories which make up the book all have a moral message
against the use of artifice and list the appalling punishments
that await vain women:
Ther was a ladi that duelled fast bi the chirche, that toke every
day so longe tyme to make redy that it made weri and angri the
person of the chirche and parissheres to abide after her . . . And
as God wolde shew for ensaumple, atte the same tyme and houre as
she loked in a mirrour, in stede of the mirrour, the develle turned
to her his ars, the whiche was so foule and orible that for ferde [fear]
she was sike longe; and atte the laste God sent her her witte and
she was chastised, and wolde no more make folke to mouse after
her, but wold be sonner arraied and atte the chirche thanne ani
other—And therfor, daughtres, takithe here your myrrour and
ensaumple to live alle such lewde folyes and counterfeting, poppinge
[tricking out] and peintinge.
Men were also warned against the evil qualities of vain
women and taking an interest in their own masculine vanity.
The Boke of Knyghthode, translated by Stephen Scrope during
the fifteenth century from an earlier French version written by
Christine de Pisan, provided men with a guide to the virtuous
ways of a true knight. To achieve the high standard of per-
fection expected of him, the aspiring knight had to pass a
series of moral tests. One classical story is retold in medieval
terms in The Boke of Knyghthode:
 And thanne Paris gaff his sentence and forsoke bothe knyghthode,
wisdom and riches for Venus, to whom he gaff the appyll; for the
whiche after that Troye was dystryd. This is to understonde, because
that Paris was not chevallrous ne reche, he sette be noo thying, but
all his thought was on love, and therfor gaffe he the appill to Venus.
Wherefor it is seide to the goode knyght that he should not demene
hym so.

Venus represented to the contemporary mind the ultimate

in idle vanity, and this sensual goddess was the opposite of the
medieval ideal of womankind whose cool beauty and pious
nature were praised in poems on courtly love. The examples
of The Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry and The Boke of
Knyghthode are evidence of the contemporary rejection of
cosmetic artifice and vanity.
The rigidly controlled way of life dictated by the Church,
with its repressive moral attitudes, restrained free artistic
expression and imaginative thinking. Although magnificent
works of architecture, lyrical poetry, beautiful needlework and
extraordinary fashions contrive to create a nostalgically beguil-
ing picture of the Middle Ages, a degree of conformity perme-
ates medieval artistic creation giving this picture the static
quality of a carefully worked tapestry. Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales with its appreciation of human character and fallibility
seems out of keeping in an age when human weaknesses, such
as vanity, were considered totally vicious and individual beauty
was robbed of its essential character by art. The use of cosmetics,
which depends on a sympathetic understanding of human
vanity and an interest in facial beauty, had little hope of general
acceptance until the end of the fifteenth century when the
rigidly set conventions of medieval life were disrupted by the
Renaissance.
 CHAPTER FIVE

Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth

Centuries

Her haire fine threads of finest gold,

In curled knots man’s thought to hold,
But that her fore-head sayes, In me
A Whiter beautie you may see;
Whiter!—in deede more white than snow
Which on cold winter’s face doth grow.
(Sir Philip Sidney. Arcadia)

The Renaissance in Italy marked the end of the Middle Ages

in Europe. The human spirit so long confined by the restrictive
pattern of medieval life poured out in a wealth of artistic expres-
sion. Inspired by the Hellenic age, Renaissance man abandoned
himself to the new freedom of intellectual invention. Romantic
love and the crude strength of the Middle Ages were refined
into a more sympathetic appreciation of all that is exquisite in
the human form and all that is exciting in a liberated imagi-
nation. The ideal man of the late fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries combined all facets of human endeavour. He was a
poet, artist, scholar and adventurer, most aptly described as
6A Man for all Seasons’. It is perhaps scarcely surprising that,
in an age when the European intellect turned in upon the
nature of man as an emancipation from old constraints upon
the imagination, there developed a new style in personal
appearance and adornment.
 In England, the spirit of the Renaissance was slow to awaken
and only came to full fruition in the reign of Elizabeth I.
However, the fashions of the early Tudor period illustrate the
influence of Italy. A Tudor gentleman most particularly repre-
sents the Renaissance element in England with his richly
coloured clothes, padded out to vast proportions to exaggerate
his masculine form and to give an impression of powerful,
latent virility. But the Tudor woman still retains the rigid
immobility of a Gothic carving with her dresses of weighty
fabric embossed with lavish embroidery. The inflexibility of her
garments give her a static splendour so admirably illustrated
in Holbein’s portraits.
Holbein’s detailed paintings of his contemporary subject
give a clear picture of the Tudor ideal of beauty. Henry VIII
epitomises an ideal of masculine handsomeness with his pale
complexion, light red-gold hair and beard set off to advantage
by gargantuan expanses of warm-textured velvet and the
glowing light and shade of embroidered silk. Tudor feminine
beauty is perfectly represented in a portrait of Anne Boleyn
by an unknown artist of the day {Plate 14), Her hair is drawn
smoothly back under the pearled archway of a Tudor head-
dress, ,which frames her white oval face and draws attention
to her dark eyes with their secretive expression reminiscent
of Leonardo da Vinci’s 6Mona Lisa’.
For both sexes a pale complexion remained, as in the Middle
Ages, a desired feature of their appearance. A light white
powder and blush of rouge may have been used by a few women
to enhance their complexions, but cosmetics were not generally
used until Elizabeth’s reign. Instead, preventive measures were
taken to ensure the preservation of a white skin. Undoubtedly,
the Tudor gable headdress, which owed its inspiration to the
architectural conventions of the day, sheltered the face from
the sun and, later in the century, the same purpose was served
by the 6French hood’ which shaded the forehead.
 Although cosmetics were not much used in the early Tudor
period, perfume was popular with both sexes. Scents were
imported from the Continent, but men and women also created
their own recipes chiefly based on herbal properties. Henry
VIII was reputed to have invented this recipe: 6Of compound
water take six spoonfuls, as much of Rose-Water, a quarter of
an ounce of fine sugar, two grains of Musk, two grains of
Amber-greece, two of Civet: boyl it softly together: all the
house will smell of Cloves’. (Sir Hugh Platt, Delightes for
Ladies, 1602.) Perfume was an aesthetic necessity in Tudor and
Elizabethan times, acting as a deodorant. An additional
6deodorant’ was provided by the pomander.
Pomanders (pommes d'ambre, literally 6amber apples’) were
introduced to England about 1500. The 6apple’, which was
frequently attached to the sash ends of a girdle, contained
scents and herbs, including nutmeg, rosewater, aloes and
ambergris. One Elizabethan recipe is more detailed:

Of Beazon take one dram and a half, of Storax half a dram, of

Lignum Aloes in fine powder half a scruple, of Labanum half an
ounce: powder all these very fine, and fearce them thorow lawn:
and then take of Musk a dram, Amber-greece ten grains, Civet ten
grains, and dissolve them in a hot Morter with a little rosewater, and
so make them them into a Pomander, putting into it six grains of
Civet. (Sir Hugh Platt. Delightes for Ladies.)

Pomanders continued to be fashionable throughout the reign

of Elizabeth I. Apart from their aromatic quality, men and
women believed in their medicinal value. Presumably they felt
that no disease could flourish in the proximity of such a
delightful scent.
Elizabeth’s coronation on 15 January 1559 marked the
beginning of a new phase of the Renaissance in England. The
young queen epitomised the spirit of the age, combining
scholarship, statecraft and queenly authority with feminine
 Fig 11 Pomander or scent case in gilt set with small
enamels, Dutch, c 1600

allure. She attracted to her court brilliant and unusual men

who in every way reflected a new mode of thought. The Gothic
shadow of early Tudor England ebbed away before the promise
of a new and brilliant future. The fashions of the day reflected
this change in attitude. The ponderous magnificence of early
Tudor costume disappeared in favour of lighter padded clothes,
which made use of lavish and bright coloured fabrics, exquisite
embroidery and huge lace ruff's. An amalgam of these features
gave fashions a feminine quality.
This was certainly due to Elizabeth. It would be true to say
that no single individual has ever exerted such an influence
on the fashions and beauty of a period. The large ruff charac-
teristic of this era was adapted by Elizabeth from an earlier
Spanish version, and the fine filigree of white lace made a
perfect foil for her pale complexion and elaborately curled red-
gold hair. In the queen was personified the Elizabethan ideal
of beauty {Plate 15).

A Mayden Queen that shone as Titan’s Ray

In glistring gold and perelesse pretious stone
(Spenser. ‘The Faerie Queene’)

When she ascended the throne at twenty-five years of age her

natural handsomeness was beyond dispute, but the preservation
of her beauty became an obsession stemming from feminine
vanity and perhaps a sense of insecurity which was both
political and emotional. Certainly this interest in preserving her
appearance prompted Elizabeth to resort to the use of ingenious
cosmetic artifice.
Cosmetics had begun to be generally used by the year of her
coronation. The main inspiration for their use as an aid to
beauty came from Italy, where the women were well in advance
of their English contemporaries. Foreign ambassadors com-
mented favourably on the natural complexions of Englishwomen
in comparison to the heavily painted faces of Italians. In Italy,
women used cosmetics liberally, employing a range of tints to
colour their eyelids and even their teeth. The influence of the
ancient Hellenic culture that inspired the Renaissance is illus-
trated in the preference for dyed blonde hair or saffron wigs
dressed and curled into a contemporary adaptation of an
ancient Greek hairstyle. Catholic priests were severely critical
of this use of artifice, but the mood of the Renaissance pre-
vailed over these dictates and Italians continued to dress
lavishly and adorn their faces with cosmetics. Many con-
temporary laymen, too, felt that the use of 6paint’, as cosmetics
were aptly named, had reached an excess. Even such sophisti-
cated men as Count Baldassare Castiglione were disgusted with
the sight of painted women at the Italian court:

All women generally have a great desire to be, and when they
canne not be, at the least to appear beautyfall. Therefore where
nature in some part hath not done her devoyr therein, they endeavour
themselves to supply it with out. Of this ariseth the trymming of
the face, with such studye and many times peines, the pilling of the
browes and forehead, and the usynge of all these maner wayes and
the abydyng of such lothsomenesse as you women believe are kepte
very secrete from men, and yet do all men know them (Count
Baldassare Castiglione. The Book of the Courtier. Translated by
Sir Thomas Hoby, 1561)

The clergy of the Anglican Church and lay puritans were

equally critical of Englishwomen who adopted the cosmetic
arts of Italian women. There is a theory that the Reformation
was indirectly to blame for these frivolous innovations. The
Dissolution of the Nunneries had increased the number of
laywomen in the country and, without an example of religious
virtue to emulate, more women were open to the influence of
the new ideas in fashion. This theory, although ingenious,
seems unlikely in view of the fact that a staunchly Catholic
country such as Italy was the prime originator of cosmetic
fashions at this period.
In spite of such criticisms as Ben Jonson’s:

Still to be neat, still to be drest,

As you were going to a feast,
Still to be powder’d, still perfum’d
Lady, it is to be presumed,
though arts hid causes are not found,
All is not sweet, all is not sound.
(The Silent Woman)

Englishwomen, under Elizabeth’s leadership, adopted every new

 cosmetic fashion from the Continent. The fashionable face was
achieved by a whole series of preparations. Bearing in mind
that the queen’s pale complexion was the inspiration for con-
temporary beauty, it is not surprising that white powder was
the foundation on which the rest of the cosmetic treatment was
applied. Unfortunately, one of the most successful means of
creating a white powder was by using ceruse, or white lead,
which was extremely dangerous for the complexion and, if used
constantly, had a harmful toxic effect on the individual. This
substance formed the basis for cosmetics for several centuries
with drastic results, which will be discussed at length in a later
chapter. White powder was also made from ground alabaster
or starch with perfume added as an ingredient. After the face
was powdered, rouge was applied to the cheeks; at this period
red ochre was the most popular colourant. Rouge was also
made from a white lead base with a colouring dye included in
the compound. In either form contemporary rouge had none
of the subtlety of its modern equivalent. The lips were painted
with a 6pencil’ made from ground alabaster or plaster of Paris
which was powdered down and mixed into a paste with a
colouring ingredient. The mixture was rolled into a crayon
shape, then allowed to dry and solidify in the sun.
White powder, rouge and lip colouring formed the basic
cosmetic equipment of the fashionable Elizabethan lady. After
applying this make-up, she preserved her ‘face’ by covering her
skin with a thin glaze of egg-white and, should she venture
out of doors, her artificial complexion was further protected
by a mask. The wearing of masks during the Elizabethan period
had a dual purpose, first to preserve the face in its original
cosmetic perfection and, secondly, to provide protection against
the sun which was the chief enemy of a fashionable white
complexion. The mask was cut in an oval shape with holes for
the eyes, and kept in position by a button held in the teeth.
Elizabethan women were constantly seeking new methods of
preserving or creating a white complexion. Many ingenious
recipes were invented by contemporary housewives and by
such men as Sir Hugh Platt, whose Delightes for Ladies, one
of the first household recipe books, appeared in 1602. This
included numerous recipes for cosmetics:

To Make a Blanch For any Ladies Face

Of white Tartar take two drams, Camphire one dram, Coperas half
a dram, the whites of four Eggs, juice of two lemmons, oyl of
Tartar four ounces, Plantan water as much, white Mercury a penny-
worth, bitter Almonds two ounces, al must be powdred and mixed
with the oyl and water and then boyled upon a gentle fire and strain
it, and so keep it: the party must rub her face with a Scarlet cloath
and then over night wash her with it, and in the morning wash it
off with Bran and white wine.

Another tackles the problem of a freckled skin:

To take away Spots and Freckles from the Face and Hands
The sap that issueth out of a Birch tree in great abundance, being
opened in March and Aprill, with a receiver of Glass set under the
boring thereof to receive the same doth perfume the same most
excellently and maketh the skin very cleer.

A further recipe offers an expedient solution:

To Make the Face White and Fair

Wash they face with Rosemary boyled in white wine, and thou
shalt be fair.

White hands were also considered essential to perfect beauty.

This was undoubtedly due to the influence of Elizabeth who
was justly proud of her delicate, long-fingered white hands,
always featured so prominently in her portraits. Hands, as a
result, were frequently described in the romantic love poetry
of the period.
 Full gently now she takes him by the hand,
A lily prison’ed in a gaol of snow,
Or ivory in an alabaster band;
So white a friend engirts so white a foe
(Shakespeare. ‘Venus and Adonis’)

The high standard of perfection demanded by fashion

depended on a variety of preparations. Ointments and lotions
were concocted from ingredients such as ass’s milk, hog lard,
honey and beeswax, with added embellishments of cherries,
rose petals and herbs. Elizabethan ointments and lotions seem
to have contained relatively harmless ingredients. Hog lard,
honey and beeswax may not have improved the condition of
contemporary skins but, unlike ceruse-based cosmetics, they
were not dangerous. Turpentine and rosin were used to cure
blemished complexions. In the latter part of the sixteenth
century, bear’s grease formed a basis for some cosmetics. This
was a much safer ingredient than white lead, but proved too
expensive for general use. Olive oil was employed as a basis for
ointments and other cosmetic potions but, although quantities
of oil were imported from Spain and Italy, it never achieved a
lasting popularity. Possibly an oil-based skin lotion attracted
the sun’s rays and caused the skin to lose its fashionable
whiteness.
As trade expanded, ingredients for cosmetics and perfumes
came from farther afield and by the middle of the sixteenth
century cargoes of cosmetic materials were imported from all
over the Continent and the Levant. Cochineal and saffron
flowers, henna, Arabian gum and exotic dyes and spices poured
into the country from Marseilles, Italy, Baghdad and Cyprus.
Cosmetic materials were of such interest to Elizabethan England
that an officer on Sir Walter Ralegh’s voyage of discovery to
Guiana describes to an ‘especiall’ friend in London ‘Divers
Berryes which dye a most perfect Crimson and Carnation; and
for painting, not all France, Italy nor the East Indies yeeld any
 LATE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES

such, for the more the skinne is washed the fairer the colour
appeareth’.
Soap was also imported, mainly from Spain and Italy.
Castile soap was considered the finest, with Venetian an
excellent alternative. English manufactured soap was not
fashionable although there were home recipes for making what
was frequently described as a 6washing ball’:

Take three ounces of Orace, half an ounce of Cypress, two ounces

of Rose leaves, two ounces of Lavender flowers: beat all these
together in a Morter, fercing them thorow a fine fearce, then scrape
some Castil sope, and dissolve it with some Rose-water and then
incorporate all your powders therewith, by labouring them well in
a Morter.
{Delightes for Ladies)

Although soap was popular at this period, the standards of

hygiene were low. Baths were seldom taken except for the
medicinal treatment of rheumatism and gout, and as a method
of warming cold feet in the winter. 6Cold and naturall bathes are
greatly expedient for men subject to rheumes, dropsies and
goutes’. (William Vaughn, Artificial Directions For Health.)
This lack of bathing greatly increased the importance of
perfume but, as contemporary scents were composed of fugitive
ingredients, repeated applications must have been needed to
ensure any degree of freshness.
Elizabeth proved no exception to the general rule concerning
baths and, according to contemporary sources, resorted to this
drastic means of cleanliness once a month. She probably used
one of the many contemporary perfumes and, although
historians write that she preferred a light scent, it is possible
that a heavier scent with lasting qualities was not available at
this period. She made liberal use of rose water which was
imported for her from Antwerp, but her own special scent was
a delicate mixture of herbs with a predominance of marjoram.
 Scented water was used for washing the face and hands, and
William Vaughn suggests that to 6Wash your face, eyes, eares
and handes with fountaine water’ was an agreeable method of
cleansing and beautifying the skin. Etiquette demanded that
hands should be washed before meals as at this period it was
 16 (above) Queen Elizabeth I.
Detail of an engraving, by
William Rogers, which illustrates a
bizarre cosmetic fashion. The
painting of artificial veins on the
forehead was probably adopted by
Elizabeth in middle age to simulate
a youthfully translucent
complexion.

17 (right) Elizabethan gentleman.

A portrait miniature by Nicholas
Hillyarde. A perfect representation
of the Elizabethan courtier, whose
curled locks, well-groomed
moustache and whimsically lovesick
pose are more reminiscent of an
Italian gentleman and indicate the
influence Italy had on contemporary
looks in England.
still common to have a dish of food from which everyone
helped themselves. ‘Before meals it is right to wash your hands
openly, even though you have no need to do so, in order that
those who dip their fingers in the same dish as yourself may
know for certain that you have cleaned them’. (Della Casa.
Galateo. Mid-sixteenth century.)
Clothes were liberally perfumed after laundering.

A Special Sweet Water to Perfume Clothes in the Folding, being washed

Take a quart of Damask rosewater, and put it into a Glass, put
into it a handful of Lavender flowers, two ounces of Orris, a dram
of musk, the weight of four-pence of Amber-greece, as much of Civet,
four drops of oyl of Cloves; stop this close, and set it in the sun a
fortnight; put one spoonful of this water into a Glass, and so sprinkle
your clothes therewith in your folding.
(Delightes for Ladies)

Gloves, which were an important fashion accessory, were also

scented and so were handkerchiefs.
A noticeable aspect of the appearance and an important item
of personal hygiene were the teeth. Their condition, due to an
unbalanced diet and unhealthy living standards, was deplorable.
Tf she have black and rugged Teeth, let her offer the less a
laughter, especially if she laugh wide and open’. (Ben Jonson.
The Silent Woman.')
Teeth were cleaned by rubbing them with a linen cloth, after
which the mouth was rinsed out with a mouth wash. William
Vaughn, writing in 1600, gives an ingenious, if ineffective,
routine for dental care:

Pick and rub your teeth and because I would not have you bestow
much cost in making dentifrices, I will advertise you by foure rules
of importance how to keep your teeth white and uncorrupt, and
also have a sweet breath. First wash well your mouth when you
have eaten your meate, secondly sleepe with your mouth somewhat
open. Thirdly spit out in the morning . . . then take a linnen cloth
 and rub your teeth well within and without to take away the
fumositie of the meate and the yellownesse of the teeth.

The mouth wash consisted of:

i a glass of vinegar and as much of the water of the masticke

tree, of rosemarie, mirrhe, masticke, bole, Arkmoniake, Dragon’s
herbe, roche allome of each of them an ounce, and of fountain water
three glassfulles; mingle all well together, and let it boile with a
final fire, adding to it halfe a pound of honie, and taking away the
scum of it, then put in a little bengwine, and when it hath sodden
a quarter of an houre, take it from the fire, and keepe it in a cleane
bottle and wash your teeth therewithall.

Sir Hugh Platt describes a 6sweet and delicate dentifrice, or

rubbers for the Teeth’:

Dissolve in four ounces of warm water three or four drams of

Gumdragagant, and in one night this will become a little substance
like a gelly; mingle the same with the powder of Alabaster finely
ground and fearsed, then make up this substance into little round
rouls, of the bigness of a child’s arrow.

Mouth washes, dentrifrices and sucking jewels were employed

to keep the mouth fresh, but the most popular and expedient
form of dental care was the toothpick. Elizabethan toothpicks
were made of gold, silver, ivory or hartshorn. A New Year’s
gift to Elizabeth included a selection of gold toothpicks and
linen rubbing cloths edged in black and silver. A toothpick
was frequently carried on the person, but as Della Casa writes
in the Galateo:

Anyone who carries a toothpick hung on a cord around his neck

is certainly at fault, for besides the fact that it is a strange object to
see drawn from beneath a gentleman’s waistcoat and reminds us of
those cheapjack dentists who can be seen in the market-place, it
also shows that the wearer is well-equipped and provided with the
wherewithal! of a glutton.
 Hair cleanliness was another problem. Headdresses dimi-
nished in importance towards the end of the sixteenth century
and were replaced by elaborately curled hairstyles built up over
padding and wire frames. The focus on hair meant that it had
to be kept in good condition. The most popular method of
cleaning hair was by the use of ‘lye’, a compound of wood ash
and water. ‘You shall find it wonderful expedient, if you bath
your head foure times in the yeere and with hot lie made from
ashes.’ (William Vaughn. Artificial Directions for Health.)
It was essential that hair should be the right fashionable
colour. Elizabeth’s own naturally red hair set the pattern for
the rest of female society, but golden hair was also popular
due to the influence of the Italian court. Dyes were used to
colour hair ‘a fair yellow or golden colour’; and ‘the Dog
berry is an excellent berry to make a golden liquor withal for
this purpose’. (Delightes for Ladies?) Another recipe suggests
that after washing the hair ‘by a good fire in warm Allom water

Fig 13 Ivory comb carved with foliated ornament, putti and roundels with
male and female busts, German, c 1520
with a sponge, you may moisten the same in a decoction of
Tumerick, Rubarb or the bark of the Barberry tree, and so it
will receive a most fair and beautiful colour’. A dye for red
hair employs the use of 6the last water that is drawn from
Honey, being of a deep red colour, performeth the same
excellently but the same hath a strong smell’. {Delightes for
Ladies.}
With middle age, Elizabeth’s hair decreased in quantity and
lost its youthful fiery glow. Loss of colour could be replaced by
dyes, but its poor quality made it difficult to dress into the
fashionable curled style. Elizabeth therefore took to wearing
wigs and society ladies followed her example. Although red-
haired wigs like the queen’s were the most popular, blonde
wigs were also worn.

Her hair is auburn, mine a perfect yellow

If that be all the difference in his love
I’ll get me such a colour’d periwig.
(Shakespeare. Two Gentlemen of Verona)

Many portraits of Elizabethan women with red hair have been

mistaken for Elizabeth, but it is probable that a wig camouflaged
their own colouring and gave them a startling likeness to the
queen.
Elizabeth had a comprehensive selection of wigs and in 1602
it is recorded that she purchased six heads of hair, twelve yards
of hair curl and a hundred other devices made of hair. She also
possessed a massive wardrobe of dresses and every form of
cosmetic preparation common to the age. Many of her cosmetics
were prepared by herself and she favoured a strange assortment
of ingredients. She was reputed to have used the fat of a puppy
dog mixed with apples to make a hair pomade, a compound of
posset curd to free her forehead from wrinkles, and an elaborate
skin lotion included egg-white, powdered egg shells, alum,
borax and white poppy seeds.
 Her face make-up of white powder, rouge and lip dye glazed
with egg white had set the fashion for other Elizabethan women.
She also plucked her eyebrows and forehead to reveal a greater
expanse of white skin, a medieval habit that persisted through-
out the Tudor and Elizabethan periods. To draw attention to
her high plucked forehead and to simulate the translucency of
a perfect white skin, Elizabeth even painted artificial veins on
her brow {Plate 16). This quaint cosmetic device was most
probably used to replace, in middle age, the natural beauty of
a youthful complexion. Cosmetics and scents were imported
for Elizabeth from all over the Continent and, as she grew
older, she tried many lotions and elixirs that purported to
preserve or recreate youth. A Dutch physician became extremely
unpopular with Elizabeth when his elixir of youth had no
effect and from then on she reposed her confidence in the
eccentric contemporary alchemist Dr John Dee.
Elizabeth’s vanity influenced the whole environment of court
life. Personal appearance was of such prime importance that
it resulted in an increased sale of mirrors. At the beginning of
the sixteenth century mirrors were an unusual luxury, but at
the end of Elizabeth’s reign they had become a universal
necessity. They were manufactured in the Netherlands and in
Venice and, as the century progressed, became more elaborate
in design. Pocket mirrors made of polished steel or glass also
became fashionable. These items of personal conceit were vital
equipment to the Elizabethan courtier.
This was undoubtedly the age of the courtier. The chivalrous
knight of the Middle Ages, with his formal ritual of courtly
love, was replaced by a lighter-hearted individual who owed
more to wit than convention. His gallantry towards women still
followed a prescribed pattern and it is interesting that two
Italian works of social etiquette were translated into English
at this period. Count Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the
Courtier was translated by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561 and the
first English version of Della Casa’s Galateo was dedicated to
that most famous of courtiers, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.
Englishmen owed much to an Italian influence in social
behaviour and dress:

Report of fashions in proud Italy

Whose manners still our tardy apish nation
Limps after in base imitation
(Shakespeare. Richard II)

and, although a puritanically English element of society

ridiculed the extreme fashions in Italian dress and etiquette,
the majority of sophisticated Englishmen followed the example
set by Italian courtiers.
Nicholas Hillyarde painted a perfect picture of the young
courtier in a delightful miniature of this period {Plate 17). He
captured the whole spirit of the romantic Elizabethan age in the
whimsically lovesick pose of his subject:

His browny locks did hang in crooked curls

And every light occasion of the wind
Upon his lips their silken parcels hurls
(Shakespeare. ‘A Lover’s Complaint’)

The English courtier wore his hair moderately long and

curled; while his moustache and pointed beard were groomed
into a perfect shape and kept in place with the aid of gum. He
used hair pomades and scent to make himself agreeable to
ladies and wore perfumed gloves to protect his white hands
from the elements. Real dandies carried fans and exquisite lace
handkerchiefs; they also wore make-up, a habit which
Shakespeare found disgusting and unmanly. Fops who per-
sisted in any excessive use of artifice to improve their appear-
ance were severely criticised by the rest of society. 4A man
ought not to embellish himself like a woman ... I sometimes
see men whose hair and beards are curled with hot tongs and
whose face, necks and hands have been smoothed and titivated
more than any young wench’. (Galateo?) Cosmetics were not
generally used by truly masculine courtiers, but the application
of too much perfume came in for criticism. ‘There should be
no excessive smell about the body, either pleasant or other-
wise, in order that a gentleman should not have the odour of
a workman nor a man carry with him the scent of a woman
or a whore’. (Galateo?)
It appears that hair-dyeing for men was not unknown at
this period and may have been an acceptable form of cosmetic
artifice, since recipes for male hair colourants appear amongst
conventional household recipes:

How to colour the head or beard into a Chestnut Colour in half an

hour
Take one part of Lead calcined with Sulphur, and one part of
quick lime; temper them somewhat thin with water; lay it upon the
hair, chafing it well in, and let it dry one quarter of an hour, or
thereabout; then wash the same off with fair water divers times;
and lastly with sope and water, and it will be a very natural hair
colour: the longer it lieth upon the hair, the browner it groweth.
(Delightes for Ladies)

The Elizabethan man was certainly more inclined towards

‘feminine’ ways than his early Tudor forebear and this was
probably due to the atmosphere of court life which was
orientated to the whims and desires of a woman. Paradoxically,
one feels that Elizabeth’s feminine nature was responsible for
the excessive masculinity of Elizabethan men, who combined
sophistication and a delightful protective courtesy towards
women with a virile sense of enterprise. Sir Philip Sidney could
be described as the ideal example of an Elizabethan gentleman,
combining the art of writing exquisite love poems with a spirit
of adventure and masculine talent for soldiery.
 The dual nature of Elizabethan men derived from the
liberated climate of the Tudor and Elizabethan age. The
intellect, freed from the mentally confined world of the Middle
Ages, inspired a spirit of adventure, sensitivity of imagination
and love of beauty. Above all it seems that the Elizabethans
had a great appreciation for the trivial as well as the serious
aspects of life. They understood that profound talent could be
combined with an enjoyment of the frivolous, which explains
why, in a climate of intellectual precocity, extravagant fashions
flourished and personal beauty was enhanced by the artful
embellishments of powder and paint.
 CHAPTER SIX

The Seventeenth Century

They will have it, that Painting the Face is against the Seventh
Commandment, forbidding all Adultery, for they suppose Painting
the Face to be no less than a degree beyond Fornication. (Puritan
attitude)
Another reason, that Painting the Face is commendable if not
necessary in Woman, is, that the Sex was created in a perfect State
of Beauty, and wou’d have continued so in Paradise; So that it is no
ignoble Ambition if the Sex aim to evade that Defect which the Fall
brought on their Form. (Anglican attitude)
(Attributed to Jeremy Taylor. Several Letters between Two Ladies
wherein the Lawfulness and Unlawfulness of Artificial Beauty In Point
of Conscience are Nicely Debated)

The reign of the first Stuart, James I, was strongly influenced

by the Elizabethan way of life, but the spirit of the old court
was corrupted into a caricature of its former self. While effecting
all the airs and graces of the dandy, the courtier of the Jacobean
period lacked the qualities of the true Elizabethan courtier.
The underlying virility of the Elizabethan man was replaced by
the feminine manner of a mignon and undoubtedly the king’s
homosexual reputation encouraged effeminacy at court.
It is certain that James I’s favourites used more make-up
than the most flamboyant of Elizabethan fops, and he was
reputed to have
kept a brace of painted creatures to be at his hand
And be drunk in a new tavern till he be not able to stand.
(contemporary popular ballad)
 The Jacobean dandy practised innumerable affectations with
the aid of scent bottles, fans and perfumed gloves, while a
single lock of his hair was allowed to remain at shoulder length
where it was tied with a silk ribbon. This was the only fashion
innovation introduced by James I and was rather preciously
described as a 6love lock’.
When Charles I came to the throne in 1625, the court,
influenced by the French taste of his queen, Henrietta Maria,
adopted Continental fashions in dress and cosmetics. Contem-
porary hairstyles showed a preference for a softer silhouette,
and both sexes wore their hair long and curled to the shoulders,
although male courtiers still tied one frond of hair into the
Jacobean 6lovelock’.
Fashions had changed drastically from the Elizabethan
period, but many cosmetics remained similar to those of the
previous century. Ceruse powder, lip dyes and rouge, which still
constituted the basic facial cosmetics, were applied with unpre-
cedented generosity, culminating in an extreme of artifice
during the Restoration period. Cosmetics had played an
important part in the liberated world of Elizabethan England,
but in the seventeenth century, in spite of the Puritan influence,
cosmetic artifice was more generally accepted due to the
Stuarts’ close contact with the French court. New fashions in
dress and cosmetics frequently originated in Paris society and
were quickly adopted by the fashion-conscious in England. This
French influence continued to be effective throughout the
century, in spite of the restrictions imposed by a civil war and
a Puritan dictatorship.
The close link with France and the Continent encouraged
increased trade in cosmetic ingredients. Barrel loads of orange
flower water, apricot face cream and exotic Parisian powders
and perfumes were imported from France. The Netherlands
supplied Hungary water, jessemy oil, perfumes and wash balls.
Dutch trade with the East Indies produced cargoes of new
 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

cosmetic ingredients and the Levant Company imported even

more exotic ingredients from Turkey and the Middle East.
Trade with India supplied sandalwood, turmeric and musk, and
Crete produced quantities of pumice stones. Italy contributed
perfumes, essences, oils, toilet water and cochineal, and other
cosmetic ingredients and preparations came from Spain and
Portugal.
Soap was still imported in great quantities from Castile and
Venice, but London manufacturers also produced three
varieties: speckled soap, which was worth £6 a ton in 1635;
white soap, worth £4 a ton, and grey soap used in cloth manu-
facture. In 1638 the soapers were incorporated as a City
company although they possessed neither hall nor livery.
William Noy, a lawyer, introduced his famous 6Project of Soap’
at this time. This was designed to produce a revenue from this
article by granting a monopoly to the Corporation of Soap
Boilers, who had to pay a duty of £8 per ton on all soap manu-
factured, plus a substantial sum for their right of patent. The
industry had become sufficiently productive for Charles I to
be able to sell these monopoly rights, but it made him unpopular
with rival soap manufacturers, who were well represented in
Parliament, and this added to the friction between the Puritan
element in Parliament and the king. Although English soap was
considered inferior in quality to the Castilian or Venetian
equivalent, London manufacturers continued to sell large
quantities and by the end of the century there were over sixty
soap factories in England.
The manufacture of mirrors became a thriving light industry
in seventeenth-century England and manufacturers united to
prevent them being imported from the Continent {Plate 18).
Looking glasses had become increasingly popular since
Elizabeth’s reign and were brought in from the Netherlands,
Venice and Paris, which was also the chief source of the pocket
mirror, an essential toilet accessory. Seventeenth-century
 looking glasses were much more elaborately designed than those
of the Elizabethan period and were manufactured with exqui-
sitely moulded frames. They were frequently given as gifts and
Ralph Verney of Claydon bought Lady Sussex a mirror from
Venice which cost £40.
The increased import of cosmetic materials, soap and mirrors
from the Continent, coupled with their extensive manufacture
in England, illustrates the importance of personal vanity in the
seventeenth century. Men and women spent large sums of
money on cosmetic preparations and devoted unlimited time
and attention to their toilette. Women’s faces were liberally
powdered with white lead powder, their lips were dyed red and
their cheeks amply rouged. In addition, their cheeks were fre-
quently 4patched’ with small spots of velvet, leather or even
paper. This extraordinary fashion became particularly important
in the Restoration period and the eighteenth century. The hair
of both sexes was crimped and curled, and often it was powdered,
although hair powder was not in general use until a later date.
Perfume was used in liberal quantities and every item of
clothing was heavily scented.
Excessive cosmetic artificiality and an exaggerated attention
to personal vanity have become historically synonymous with
the dashing cavalier and his lady. It is, however, as wrong to
assume that all royalist sympathisers approved of artificial
beauty as it is to suppose that all contemporary puritans
abandoned every form of fashionable artifice. Certainly the
true Presbyterian puritan left his hair uncurled and in many
cases it was cropped short, hence the followers of Oliver
Cromwell were aptly known as 4Crop Ears’ or 4Roundheads’.
Women frequently concealed their hair under a bonnet and
puritan hat, and left their faces unpainted.
Jeremy Taylor, a distinguished prelate and protege of Arch-
bishop Laud, was reputed to have written an amusing dialogue
between an Anglican lady and a Puritan lady in which they
 discuss artificial beauty. Although it is in Taylor’s style, there
is a theory that his wife may have written the dialogue as a
practical joke. It was entitled Several Letters between Two
Ladies wherein the Lawfulness and Unlawfulness of Artificial
Beauty in Point of Conscience Are Nicely Debated, Published
for the satisfaction of the Fair Sex, It illustrated to perfection
the opposing viewpoints of royalist and puritan. The puritan
lady opens the discussion: 6Persons of Quality, who not content
with Nature’s stock of Beauty, do (not by a fine, but filthy art)
add something to the advantage, as they think, of their Com-
plexions; but, I fear, to the deforming of their Souls’. The
6royalist’ lady argues that any Puritan would use medicine to
combat disease and 6Only in the point of Colour or Tinctures,
added in the least kind or degree, they are not more scrupulous
than censorious; as if every one that used these had forsaken
Christ’s banner, and now fought under the Devil’s colours’.

Puritan lady: ‘Truly, Madam, I absolutely think (without mincing

or distinction) all Colour or Complexion added to our Skins or
faces, beyond what is purely natural, to be a sin, as being flatly
against the Word of God . . . Jezebel, though a Queen, was yet not
tolerated or excused, but foully branded and heavily punished for
painting her eyes or face.’
Royalist lady: ‘Among which this of her painting is indeed set
down chiefly, to shew, that no advantage of outward Beauty, natural
or artificial (though set off with the Curiosity and Majesty of a
Queen) are sufficient to make any Person the object of either Love
or Pity.’
Puritan lady: ‘But Painting the face, good Madam, is mentioned in
two other places of Scripture, as the practice of Lewd and Wicked
Women.’

The answer which the 6royalist’ lady gives at this point in

the conversation criticises the double standards of many puritans
who, although against the use of cosmetics, were content to
comfort themselves with other vanities and luxuries:
 If your Ladiship thinks the sharp stile of that place strikes so
severely against all Painting and Complexioning as a Sin, why may
you not also by the same severity destroy and disallow all other
things there expressed in the same Tone and Tenour? As dressing
and decking yourself with any costly and comely ornaments, all
sweet perfumes, all sitting on rich and stately beds, with tables
before them ... I will not captiously reply upon your Ladiship, by
putting you to plead for your own and your children’s wearing of
well-set, curled, gummed, braided and powdered hair . . . nor will
I retort upon your gold jewels, ear-rings and costly apparel . . . are
more expressly against the Letter of those Scriptures, than anything
you have yet urged against Tincture or Complexioning.

But the puritan lady, with the single-mindedness of a true

bigot, can only repeat the same accusation against the use of
cosmetics: 6But, good Madam, laying side the Flourishes of
Wit and Colours of Speech, (whereof I am not prone to be
guilty) in Plain English, Ought not a Christian to rest humbly
content and satisfied with the Will of God, submitting thereto
without any such contending in patching and painting ways’.
The viewpoint of the puritan lady in this dialogue would
have been strongly upheld by Oliver Cromwell and in the year
after Charles I’s execution, a bill was introduced to Parliament
against 6the Vice of Painting and wearing black Patches and
immodest Dresses of Women’. Although this bill never became
an act, from this date onwards, during the exile of the Stuart
court, the Puritans labelled as prostitutes all women who used
cosmetics. Parliament also levied a heavy tax on soap, which
continued until the Restoration of Charles II in 1660.
During this period of oppressive Parliament rule, many
ardent royalists followed the young future king to exile in
France. The Verneys of Claydon were one such family and it is
probably due to these exiles that so many new cosmetic ideas
were introduced into England after the Restoration. One
French fashion which fascinated Sir Ralph Verney was the
periwig which provided men with an excellent substitute for a
 natural curled coiffure. ‘Let it be well curled in great rings and
not frizzled and see that he makes it handsomely and fashion-
ably, and with two locks, and let them be tyed with black
ribbon’. (Verney Memoirs.) This edifice of hair would have cost
Sir Ralph twelve livres at this time. Natural hair was cropped
short under the wig to ensure a close fit. The French prided
themselves on the invention of such a hygienic fashion, as long
hair was difficult to keep clean due to the inefficiency of soap.
Royalist families in exile, though hampered by low finances,
endeavoured to keep up with French fashions and Sir Ralph
Verney was determined that his wife should have a good supply
of ‘pomatums . . . pinns, oris powder and such matters’ sent
from London. The exiles also supplied their friends in England
with French cosmetic preparations. Sir John Cooke, writing
to an English friend, asks him to give a present of French hair
powder to a lady: ‘ a small phiole of white Cyprus powder,
which I beseech you present to my Lady as an example of the
best Montpelier affords, for I saw it made myself. It must be
mixed with other powder, else it will bring the headache. There
is powder cheaper, but not so proper for the hair’. (Verney
Memoirs); and an English friend writing to Sir Ralph Verney
asks him to find out about the new French fashion of ‘little
brushes for making cleane of the teeth, most covered with gold
and sylver Twiste together with some petits Bouettes [boxes] to
put them in.’ (Verney Memoirs.)
In the year 1660, the exiled Stuart court returned to England
and Charles II was crowned in Westminster Abbey. Royalist
supporters made every effort to ensure that the coronation was
a suitably lavish affair and families participating in the pro-
cession celebrated the occasion by spending exorbitant sums
of money on clothing for themselves and their retinues. The
Earl of Bedford spent £1,000 on dress for his retinue and this
did not include clothing for his immediate family. This unpre-
cedented display of extravagance set the tone for the rest of
 the century and society reacted against the restrictive period of
Puritanism by indulging in extremes of fashion in dress and
cosmetic artifice. Vanity was no longer a vice but a desirable
virtue.
The contemporary ideal of beauty was perfectly represented
in the portraits by Peter Lely. The women, in flowing silk
dresses enhanced with delicate lace and with their hair softly
curled, have a look of subtle sensuality. Their complexions are
rose-tinted and their features generously moulded, with soft
red lips and dark luminous eyes more reminiscent of French
than of English beauty.
The king collaborated with his subjects in their efforts to
dispel the blight of puritanism from England and introduced
many exotic fashions inspired by ideas gleaned from the French
court (Plate 19). The periwig became an essential accessory and,
for the first time in history, wigs were worn as an item of
fashion in their own right rather than as a means of disguising
loss of hair. They cost vast sums of money and, in 1672, the
Earl of Bedford paid his wigmaker £54 10s for four periwigs
which individually cost £20, £18, £10 and £6. Contemporary
drama alluded to the cost of wigs. ‘Perriwigs so dear, that the
Devil take me, I am reduc’d to that extremity in my cash, I
have been forc’d to rentrench in that one Article of Sweet
Pawder, till I have braught it dawn to Five Guineas a Month
. . . Now judge, Tam, whether I can spare you Five Hundred
Pounds.’ (Sir John Vanbrugh. The Relapse.) Quantities of
women’s hair were imported to supplement local supplies used
in the manufacture of wigs, but the periwig nearly went out of
fashion during the Great Plague of London in 1665 when
6nobody will dare to buy any haire for fear of the infection,
that it had been cut off the heads of people dead of the plague’.
(Samuel Pepys. Diary.) However, even the risk of deadly
disease did not dissuade society from relying on their false hair
once the initial fear had been surmounted by vanity.
 The # Inter habit
of a ne Migl/h Gen tl ewoma n
22 (/e/z) Mrs Siddons.
Portrait by Thomas
Gainsborough
whose paintings
conveyed the impression
that eighteenth-century
women possessed
naturally beautiful
‘English rose’
complexions, an idea
which was contradicted
by the contemporary
caricaturist.

23 (below) 'Dressing for a

Birthday’. Caricature by
Thomas Rowlandson.
Contemporary woman
seen through the eyes of
a satirical artist. Note
the ‘patched’ cheeks;
patches hid disfiguring
marks left by smallpox.
 Women rarely wore full wigs at this period, but their natural
hair was supplemented with false pieces and curled into the
semblance of an artificial concoction. Foreheads were plucked
and decorated with spirals of hair described as Favorites. Curls
were extremely popular and appeared in every shape and form

Fig 14 Nell Gwyn’s looking glass of beadwork, padded

to represent figures, with silver braid edging, English,
mid-seventeenth century
as a decorative device. The Fop's Dictionary of 1700 describes,
amongst other fashionable affectations, ‘Les Meurtrieres—
Murderers; a certain knot in the Hair, which ties and unites
the Curls’ and ‘Le Creve-Coeur—Heartbreakers, the two small
curl’d Locks at the Nape of the Neck’.
The extravagant quality of contemporary hairstyles was
echoed in the artificial ornamentation of the face. Cosmetics
were used to an unprecedented degree and, to modern eyes, the
late-seventeenth-century face would have appeared theatrically
over-painted. It is possible that theatrical make-up did influence
many women in their use of cosmetics. Judging by Pepys’s Diary,
society spent a great deal of time at the theatre where, for the
first time in English dramatic history, actresses instead of young
actors could be seen playing female roles. At a time when
novelty was thought a virtue, actresses were a delightful inno-
vation and Charles II set an example to the rest of society by
courting one of the most popular comediennes of her day,
Nell Gwyn {Plate 20), Her success with the king resulted in
actresses being accepted as 6fringe’ members of society and well-
born ladies may well have copied from them the exaggerations
of stage make-up in their own daily use of cosmetics. It is
certain that actresses were heavily painted for their theatrical
performances. Pepys writes of Nell Gwyn and Mrs Knipp,
another popular actress, 6But, Lord! to see how they were both
painted would make a man mad, and did make me loathe them’.
The contemporary face was blanched with powder and the
cheeks were dyed with 6Spanish leather’ rouge from Seville.
6Spanish leather’ was a piece of scarlet leather (the alternative
was 6Spanish paper’), which coloured the skin on application.
Blemishes, such as spots or pock marks, were hidden by an
exotic array of 6patches’ shaped like stars or crescent moons.
It is interesting that these were cut out in such obviously
oriental symbols, in view of the Eastern influence in male
costume currently described as 6The Persian Mode’ (John
Evelyn). The artificial complexion was still protected out of
doors by a mask; this contemporary equivalent of the
Elizabethan fashion was described as a 6Loo Mask’ and covered
only half the face. The fact that this half-mask offered less
protection was perhaps of secondary importance at a time
when coquetry in women was desirable and the 6Loo Mask’,
which offered a half-veiled glimpse of identity, created endless
possibilities for seductive flirtation (Plate 21). Men also wore
masks and the expression 6bare-faced’ originates from this
period when few members of society ventured into the London
streets with their faces uncovered. Ornate fans were used for
the same purpose as masks.
An unblemished skin was a rarity at this period, but every
attempt was made to acquire and preserve a pure, pale com-
plexion. Charles H’s queen, Catherine of Braganza, was never
considered very attractive by the English because her skin
colouring was dark.
The Queen arrived with a train of Portuguese ladies in their
monstrous fardingales or guard-infantes their complexions olivarder
[olive-coloured] and sufficiently unagreeable. Her Majesty in the
same habit, her fore-top long and turned aside very strangely. She
was yet of the handsomest countenance of all the rest, and, though
low of stature, prettily shaped, languishing and excellent eyes, her
teeth wronging her mouth by sticking a little too far out; for the
rest, lovely enough. (John Evelyn. Diary)

John Evelyn’s assessment of Catherine’s looks was far more

charitable than that of his contemporaries, but even he men-
tioned her outmoded dress and unfashionably dark skin. The
king, however, seemed delighted with his young queen whose
childlike vulnerability may have appealed to his masculine
sense of gallantry: 6I can only give you an account of what I
have seen abed, which in shorte is, her face is not so exact as
to be called a beauty, though her eyes are excellent good, and
not anything in her face that in the least degree can shoque
one’. Unfortunately for the queen, his appreciation of feminine
qualities was not restricted to her alone and during his lifetime
he formed many liaisons with other women. His mistresses
were a considerable drain on the king’s purse, as alimonies had
to compensate for royal indiscretions and presents were
expected as tokens of the king’s esteem. Such gifts as apricot
paste and other costly ointments were highly prized by the
recipients as cosmetics had soared in price after the Restoration.
Expensive cosmetic items were acquired by most members of
society, and exotic or exclusive preparations were regarded as
a form of 6status symbol’. Home-made lotions and ointments
were also in evidence. An interesting correspondence between
Lady Sussex and her friends, the Verneys, illustrates the use of
home recipes for beauty: 6The fines thing that can be my cosen
baron sayeth is poset curd with red rose lefes boyled in the
milke and torned with ale’ and 6Myrrh water is good to make
on 10k younge longe; I only wete a fine cloth and wipe my
face over at night with it.’ (Verney Memoirs.) These two
recipes seem very Elizabethan in content; perhaps seventeenth-
century men and women believed their forebears had a special
talent in this field. There may be, for this reason, a connection
between Elizabeth I’s pomade, reputedly made from puppy dog
fat, and the unsavoury seventeenth-century belief that drinking
puppy dog urine was good for the complexion. Puppy dog fat
was also used in contemporary recipes:

To Make Pig, or Puppidog Water for the Face

Take a Fat Pig, or a Fat Puppidog, of nine days old, and kill it,
order it as to Roast, save the Blood, and fling away nothing but
the Guts; then take the Blood, and Pig or the Puppidog, and break
the Legs and Head, with all the Liver and the rest of the Inwards,
of either of them put all into the still if it will hold it, to that, take
two Quarts of old Canary, a pound of unwash’d Butter not salted;
a Quart of Snails-shells, and also two Lemmons, only the out-
side pared away; Still all these together in a Rose Water Still,
 either at once or twice; Let it drop slowly into a Glass-Bottle, in
which there be a lump of Loaf-Sugar, and a little Leaf-gold. (The
Lady's Dressing Room Unlock'd and The Fop's Dictionary, 1700)

The use of such toxic ingredients in cosmetic preparations

and a generally low standard of hygiene resulted in early loss of
beauty: ‘they cry a Woman’s past her prime at twenty, Decay’d
at four and twenty, old and unsufferable at thirty’ (Sir George
Etherege. The Man of Mode?) Society women were therefore
anxious to find any means of prolonging their youthful looks as

The deprav’d apetite of this Vicious Age

Tastes nothing but green Fruit, and loathes it when
Tis’ kindly ripen’d.
(The Man of Mode)

This desire to remain beautiful made contemporary women

particularly gullible to the promises of a charlatan physician,
Dr Alexander Bendo, who elected to cure blemished com-
plexions with his miraculous concoctions. When Bendo set up
his business in a goldsmith’s house in London, in the guise of
an ‘Italian doctor’, society did not guess the true identity of this
enigmatical man of medicine. Bendo was none other than the
eccentric young Earl of Rochester who had been banished from
court circles for writing a rude lampoon against Charles II. A
worse fate than banishment would have awaited the earl had he
not been the king’s ward, but Rochester’s restive nature did not
take kindly to enforced exile in the country and a return to
society in disguise appealed to his daredevil spirit and sense of
humour. It also put him in contact with numerous society
ladies. Whilst at court, Rochester had acquired a considerable
reputation as a rake; his sexual appetites had extended to all
levels of society from aristocratic women to serving wenches,
whom he frequently seduced disguised as a court servant.
Therefore, in his new guise of ‘doctor’, his ‘patients’ trusted him
as an honourable medical man. His ability in amateur chemistry
made it possible for him to create cosmetic preparations, whose
effectiveness was largely an illusion imbued with credibility by
4Bendo’s’ claims of success on the Continent:

The knowledge of these secrets, I gathered in my travels abroad

(where I have spent my time ever since I was fifteen years old, to
this my nine and twentieth year) in France and Italy. Those that have
travelled in Italy, will tell you what a miracle art does there assist
Nature in the preservation of beauty; how women of forty bear
the same countenance with those of fifteen: ages are no way dis-
tinguished by faces; whereas here in England, look a horse in the
mouth, and a woman in the face, you presently know both their
ages to a year. I will, therefore, give you such remedies, that, with-
out destroying your complexion (as most paints and daubings do),
shall render them perfectly fair; clearing and preserving them from
all spots, freckles, heats, pimples and marks of the small-pox, or
any other accidental ones, so that the face be not seamed or scarred.

Like most capricious characters, Rochester tired of his new

role after a time and returned to the country. He was eventually
pardoned by the king, but only survived to the age of thirty-
three when he died of a fever.
Nicholas Culpeper, a contemporary physician and herbalist,
employed his more genuine talents to compile a book of herbal
medicines and beauty preparations, which were based on the
writings of Pliny and Hippocrates. The Physician and Herbal
listed numerous natural remedies in which even the most
commonplace wild plants were used as ingredients. 4The Teasle:
The distilled water of the leaves is often used by women to
preserve their beauty’ and 4The Elm Tree: The water that is
found in the bladders of the leaves while it is fresh, is very
effectual to cleanse the skin and make it fair’. It is a lasting
tribute to the effective quality of Culpeper’s preparations that
his herbal cosmetics, based on the original recipes, are still
popular today.
 The importance of cosmetics at this period meant that much
time was spent in the boudoir experimenting with new prepara-
tions and perfumes. This obsessive preoccupation with personal
vanity aroused criticism of an unfashionably puritanical nature
in Sir George Savile, first Marquis of Halifax, who wrote a

Fig 15 Carved pine-wood wall mirror, stained and

partly gilt. At the top, two amorini support a shield
bearing the arms of the Hildyard family of Winestead
Hall, Yorkshire, English, c 1670
 book for his daughter entitled The Lady's New Year's Gift in
which he condemned the vain woman: 6The Looking glass in
the morning dictateth to her all the Motions of the Day, which
by how much the more studied, are so much the more mistaken’
and 6She doth not like herself as God Almighty made her, but
will have some of her own Workmanship; which is so far from
making her a better thing than a woman that it turneth her into
a worse Creature than a Monkey’. These criticisms may have
had an effect on Savile’s daughter, but the majority of society
women and men continued to spend several hours of the day in
the boudoir. While they completed this lengthy toilette, they
diverted themselves by entertaining society friends; this was the
origin of the levee or 6toilet gathering’ which became an essential
part of social life during the eighteenth century. Thus dressing
rooms in most society residences assumed the importance of a
major reception room and were decorated accordingly, with
costly silk hangings and pictures which suited the taste of the
individual. The Earl of Bedford had his toilet table covered in
pale blue silk with a pin-cushion and comb bags in matching
fabric, the whole of which cost forty-five shillings in 1670.
Boudoir looking glasses were frequently given as gifts at this
time and Catherine of Braganza received from the queen
mother, Henrietta Maria, 6the great looking-glass and toilet of
beaten and massive gold’. (John Evelyn, Diary?) On the toilet
tables were beautiful boxes made of precious metals, bottles of
French perfumes and numerous pots of cosmetics:

A new Scene to us next presents,

The Dressing-Room, and Implements,
Of Toilet Plate Gilt and Emboss’d,
And several other things of Cost,
The Table miroir, one Glue Pot,
One for Pomatum, and what not,
Of Washes, Unguents, and Cosmeticks,
Snuffers, and Snuff-dish, Boxes more,
 For Powders, Patches, Waters store,
In Silver Flasks, or bottles, Cups
Cover’d or open to wash chaps.
(The Lady's Dressing Room Unlock'd)

Fig 16 Perfume essence case covered in leather with

silver mounts, and fitted with four cut-glass silver-
stoppered flasks, a silver measure and a funnel, Dutch,
late seventeenth century
The boudoir was heavily perfumed with the scent of aromatic
powder, which was liberally sprinkled all over the room and
its contents, and perfumed 6sweet bags’ made of sarcenet were
laid amongst clothes and linen to keep them fresh:

In Amber’d Skins or quilted chest

Richly perfume’d, She Lays, and rare
Powders for Garments, Some for Hair
Of Cyprus and of Corduba,
And the Rich Polvil of Goa,
Nor here omit the Bob of Gold
Which a Pomander Ball does hold

A large rich cloth of Gold toilet

Does cover, and to put Rags
Two high embroider’d Sweet Bags.
(The Lady's Dressing Room Unlock'd)

A great variety of perfumes and essences were available at

this period; and men and women acquired a selection of scents
to suit their personal taste. The Earl of Bedford used both
orange flower water and Queen of Hungary water as 6after
shave’ lotions, and other scents were:

Twelve dozen Martial, whole and half,

Of Jonquil, Tuberose (don’t laugh)
Frangipan, Orange, Violett,
Narcissus, Jassemin, Ambrett

and

D’ange, Orange, Mill-Fleur, Myrtle

Whole Quarts the chamber to bespertle.
(The Lady's Dressing Room Unlock'd)

Perfumed essences were used in great quantities to scent

gloves, which were a particularly popular accessory at this time.
Society men and women possessed many different pairs and
some households had a resident ‘glover’ to cope with the
enormous demand. The Earl of Bedford, who employed a
glover at Woburn, had gloves scented with ambrett, jasmine
and frangipane. In 1665, six pairs of gloves made for him were
scented with his favourite frangipane. The Countess of
Pembroke, sister of Louise de Keroualle, the king’s influential
French mistress, purchased 6twenty-eight pairs of open work
white gloves, with orange and amber scent—the Earl of
Pembroke dying, the gloves are no longer perfumed with orange
and amber but violet and hyacinth’. (G. M. Crawford, Louise
de Keroualle. Duchess of Portsmouth.} Unscented gloves were
rubbed with 6jessemy butter’, an aromatic ointment, and scented
powder was always used on the hands before putting on gloves.
An individual’s taste was assessed on the choice of scent and
quality of leather he used for this accessory.

Sir Fopling: ‘I sat near one of ’em at a Play today, and was almost
Poison’d with a Pair of Cordivant Gloves he wears—’
Mrs. Loveit: ‘Oh! Cordivant—How I hate the smell’
(Sir George Etherege. The Man of Mode)

Fashionable society at this time attached much importance

to what can only be described as the trivia of fashion. During
Elizabeth’s reign fashion and cosmetics had been part of a
broadening interest in art and colour as related to the human
form. By the late seventeenth century, the attention paid to
this aspect alone had grown into an absorbing obsession which,
although treated in the light-hearted manner of the day, was
nevertheless a time-consuming and socially important side of
everyday life. ‘I rise, Madam, about Ten a-clock. I don’t rise
sooner, because ’tis the worst thing in the World for the
Complexion; not that I pretend to be a Beau; but a Man must
endeavour to look wholesome, lest he make so nauseous a
Figure in the Side-Bax, the Ladies shou’d be compell’d to turn
their Eyes upon the Play’. (Sir John Vanbrugh, The Relapse.}
Contemporary beaux and their ladies seemed to enjoy the same
self-interest as Narcissus but, whilst he was content to admire
his naturally beautiful reflection in a pool, they were intent on
using every artificial aid to create their personal ideal of beauty.
A total acceptance of this attitude paved the way for the most
exaggerated period of artificiality in the history of English
cosmetic fashions.
 CHAPTER SEVEN

The Eighteenth Century

The characteristics of the Age are frenzy, folly, extravagance and

insensibility (Horace Walpole)

The eighteenth century has provided a wealth of romantic

material for historical novelists. The superficial picture of
aristocratic society at this time is one of endless routs and
soirees held in sumptiously furnished town houses. Here is a
world of honourably conducted card games between 6gentlemen
of quality’ in fashionable gaming clubs, and of select London
coffee houses where humorists indulged in a stylised repartee
of wit.
The historical novelist seldom looks beyond this romantic
facade of elegant town life peopled by men and women extra-
vagantly dressed in satins, laces and powdered wigs, and with
their cheeks rouged. Men and women alike wore elaborate
make-up and in no other period has beauty been so artificially
created. But beneath this image was often a less attractive,
sometimes grotesque reality and, although an imagined ideal
of natural beauty was sought after, fashion, as always, made a
mockery of nature.
The eighteenth-century ideal of beauty is epitomised in
portraits by Gainsborough and Reynolds {Plate 22). These
porcelain women with powered curls and pastel silk dresses
pose against a background of romanticised English countryside.
The features of these society beauties are as small and perfect
as those of a china doll, and their softly blushing complexions
inspired the idea of the ‘English Rose’.
While Gainsborough and Reynolds as fashionable portrait
painters were catering to this contemporary ideal, another side
of the picture can be seen through the caricatures of Thomas
Rowlandson (Plate 23). The portrait painter panders to the
vanity of his subject by eliminating imperfections and improving
on reality. The caricaturist exaggerates faults and creates a
vicious parody. It is difficult to know whether Gainsborough or
Rowlandson painted the more truthful portraits of his con-
temporary subject. However, the truth is less elusive if a
study is made of cosmetics used at this time. The mask of
artifice that created the fashionable face was extraordinarily
elaborate and recipes for eighteenth-century beauty would
appal a modern cosmetologist. It needs little imagination to
picture the condition of most contemporary complexions
beneath the mask.
White lead still formed the main basis for cosmetics, in
particular for face powder which was lavishly used by both
sexes. It seems incredible that such a harmful ingredient should
continue to be used. This was how white lead powder was made.
‘Cast thin soft plates of lead, then roll them into shape.’ Each
plate was then put into a pot with a bar at the bottom to
prevent the plate touching the bottom of the pot. Vinegar was
then added to ‘effect conversion’ and finally the pots were
covered with more lead plates and placed in a bed of horse
manure for three weeks. After this period had elapsed, all the
plates were beaten into flakes with battledores and ground
into a fine powder. Water was then added and the mixture
left to dry in the sun, after which it was perfumed and tinted.
The manufacture of this concoction had a significant effect
on the workmen, who suffered from severe headaches, dizzi-
ness, constipation and even blindness. All these ailments were
caused by the fumes of white lead. It may be imagined how
much more harm was done by constant application of this
powder to the sensitive skin of the face.
Inevitably, very few fashionable beauties kept their looks
beyond the age of thirty. In part, this was due to an unhealthy
diet and insanitary living conditions for, in spite of the outward
splendour, eighteenth-century London, with open drainage and
badly ventilated houses, was a breeding ground for germs. But
another reason for the swift decay of beauty was the constant
use of harmful cosmetics.
A case in point was that of the two famous Gunning sisters,
Maria and Elizabeth, who arrived in London from Ireland in
the year 1750. Their progress in society was swift, for by 1752
Elizabeth had become the Duchess of Hamilton and Maria
had married the young Earl of Coventry. The sisters’ elegance
and classical beauty set London in an uproar. Minor poets
blossomed forth in their praise:
For ah’ two Gunnings wound
With different, yet with equal beauties crowned.

and
their shapes are so slender, so charming their air,
so ruddy their cheeks, their complexions so fair.

Horace Walpole was their only critic: 6these two Irish girls
of no fortune, who are declared the handsomest women alive.
I think their being two such handsome and both such perfect
figures is their chief excellence: for singly I have seen much
handsomer women than either’. But the Gunnings were the
darlings of London society and, as the central attraction of
every gathering, dressed and painted their faces according to
fashion.
By 1760, the young Countess of Coventry was dying of con-
sumption. Apart from the ravaging effects of disease, her
beauty had faded with constant use of dangerous cosmetics.
Ill
Lying on her sofa with looking glass in hand, she finally asked
to be carried to her bedchamber. The curtains were drawn and
in a darkened room she died where none could see her pallid
complexion and drawn face. Her sister, the Duchess of
Hamilton, more fortunately lived to a ripe old age but her looks
had also suffered by the age of thirty.

Fig 17 Salt-glazed stoneware bust of a

lady wearing patches,
Staffordshire, c 1740

There was another, more arbitrary reason for early loss of

beauty. Smallpox, that widespread scourge, left faces pitted
and marked for life. It was the disfiguring effects of this disease
which had been instrumental in starting the fashion of applying
patches to the face, the ideal camouflage for pock marks. The
patch, or mouche, was in common use in the eighteenth
24 (above left) ‘The Prepostrous Headdress of the Feathered Lady'. A satirical view of a
contemporary hairstyle. Powdered wigs were generally worn, but many women had their
hair built up into a mountain of curls with the aid of false hair pieces. The finished article
resembled an exotic gateau.
25 (above right) ‘The Lady’s Maid, or Toilet Head-dress’. An amusing fantasy illustration
combining the exaggerated hairstyle of the day with a representation of a contemporary
dressing table.
26 (below) The Countess's Morning Levee, from William Hogarth’s ‘Marriage a la Mode’.
The society lady’s elaborate toilette took so long to complete that guests were entertained
meanwhile, so that no time was wasted away from the social scene.
27 ‘The Progress of the Toilet’ by James Gillray. A series of satirical illustrations showing
three stages of a Regency lady’s toilet: ‘The Stays’, ‘The Wig’ and ‘The Dress Completed',
with particular interesting detail of the contemporary dressing room and toilet table.
century. Cut out of silk, taffeta or even Spanish leather, it was
variously shaped and coloured; black was popular, with bright
scarlet a close favourite.
Those who were seriously disfigured by smallpox patched
their faces to such an extent that Steele (Isaac Bickerstaff), of
The Tatler. writes to a female correspondent with a concern
owing more to aesthetics than gallantry:
Madam,
Let me beg of you to take off the patches at the lower end of your
left cheek and I will allow two more under your left eye, which will
contribute more to the symmetry of your face; except you would
please to remove the ten black atoms on your Ladyship’s chin, and
wear one large patch instead of them. If so, you may properly enough
retain the three patches above mentioned.
I am etc.

As Steele indicates, this fashion was not an exclusively feminine

one. 4There lay a Male Coquet. He had a bottle of salts hanging
over his Head, and upon the table by his bedside, Suckling’s
poems, with a little heap of black patches on it.’
Eighteenth-century society must have been grateful for this
bizarre fashion as most skins were blemished by pock marks.
The only women reputed to retain a perfect complexion were
milkmaids, who were immunised from smallpox by catching a
mild form of the disease from cattle. This gave rise to the
popular nursery rhyme:
Where are you going to my pretty maid
I’m going a-milking, Sir, she said
and
What is your fortune my pretty maid
My face is my fortune, Sir, she said.
Lady Wortley Montagu, an unusual woman of great person-
ality, had been disfigured in her youth by smallpox. Against
opposition, she campaigned persistently for inoculation and
Fig 18 Pique-work patch box of tortoiseshell inlaid with silver and mother-
of-pearl, French, c 1740

had the courage to allow her beloved son to be the first person
in England to be immunised in this way. By the end of the
century, in spite of warnings from sceptical diehards and
cynics, her efforts were rewarded. Many people were inocu-
lated and patches were less frequently worn.
Mouseskin eyebrows were another false ‘additive’ to beauty.
Men and women trimmed and tortured their own eyebrows
into shape, blackening them with lead combs, but fashion
dictated that this was no substitute for elegant artificial brows.
Unfortunately, these did not always stay in place, and it was
a familiar sight to see frantic adjustments being made with an
air of apparently unconcerned nonchalance.
In an age when even the fashionable relied on an unhealthy
diet, teeth soon rotted and discoloured. A false porcelain set
proved a popular camouflage and ‘plumpers’ were used to
swell sunken cheeks to a fashionable roundness. ‘Plumpers’
were small cork balls worn inside the cheeks and, with the
additional impediment of false teeth, many an individual
became tongue-tied and silent. Inevitably, 6plumpers’ did much
to contribute to the fashionable lisp, so desirable amongst
ladies of society.

Fig 19 Solid carved-ivory false teeth for upper jaw,

eighteenth or early nineteenth century

An amalgam of all these items of cosmetic artifice gives a

clear picture of the appearance of eighteenth-century men and
women. Their faces were painted porcelain-white with lead
powder, their eyebrows supplemented with mouseskin and their
cheeks dotted with patches and rounded with 6plumpers’.
Rouge added the finishing touch to the fashionable complexion.
Rouges included carmine; rouge blanche made from a white
lead base, as the name implies; 6vegetable rouge’ which suggests
a vegetable dye, and 6serviette rouge’, a rag dipped in colouring
dye. Rouge, apart from 6serviette rouge’, was applied with
Spanish or Chinese wool and was considered to be the most
vital part of face make-up: 6The last box of rouge he sent me
was too pale by at least two tinges—and you know Sir Harry,
there is no making a decent complexion, unless the rouge is in
perfection.’ (6The Macaroni Dialogue’, Ladies Magazine, 1773.)
Lips were also rouged with carmine or painted with lipsticks,
which were made from ground plaster of Paris, with colouring
added according to choice.
Fig 20 Porcelain rouge pot and padded applicator with wooden handle, in
original cardboard box labelled ‘From Bayley and Blew, Cockspur Street,
London’, late eighteenth century

Once the full range of cosmetics had been bestowed on the

face, it remained to attend to the hair. Powdered wigs were
generally worn, but many women had their own hair built
up into a mountain of curls with the aid of false hair pieces
(Plate 24). The finished article, which resembled an exotic
gateau, was liberally dusted with white powder and decorated
with feathers and artificial flowers. The most adept of lady’s
maids took so long to dress these coiffures that the time set
aside for the completion of the toilette would have been exces-
sive. Rather than commit a social blunder, many women had
their hair set, so to speak, to last over a period of weeks or
even a month.
The ‘set’ consisted of holding the hair together with lard,
which undoubtedly went rancid after a day, let alone a month.
It was hardly surprising that hair became verminous, as did
wigs, which were seldom cleaned. To relieve irritation, a narrow
pronged stick of ivory was specially designed for the purpose
of scratching the scalp. Unfortunately, not only did this disturb
the fleas but also mice, which were frequently found nesting
in the hair. To prevent mice or rats attacking the larded hair,
nightcaps of silver or gold wire were sometimes worn at bed-
time. This practice must have proved just as drastic a defence
of the lady’s chastity as any belt invented by a medieval knight.
Having dealt with her basic toilette of face make-up and
hairstyle, the eighteenth-century woman would then have
dressed suitably for the day’s social engagements. It only
remained to choose some exotic perfume to accord with the
mood of the dress, and the toilette was complete.
 Perfume was used liberally by both sexes, and much care
went into the choice of the right scent for an occasion. French
perfumes were as popular as they are today. The English House of
Yardley had a flourishing soap and perfumery business in
London and their famous lavender water was already a
favourite. Hungary water was another eau de toilette that was
often used; a contemporary recipe for this includes rosemary
oil, verbena oil, Portugal oil, linette oil, peppermint oil, triple
rose water, triple orange flower water and ninety per cent
alchohol.
Apart from its obviously delightful qualities, perfume was
an essential deodorant in the eighteenth century. The lavish and
elaborate clothing was virtually impossible to clean, so per-
fumed sachets were sewn into the linings to ensure a degree of
freshness. Since contemporary perfumes had none of the lasting
fragrance of modern scents, this proved an ineffective measure
and stale perfume contributed to the unpleasant odour of
unclean garments.
A general lack of bathing was another reason for the liberal
use of perfume. Bathrooms were not unknown, but they were
merely status symbols. Sporting a truly magnificent outward
show of silk curtains, the bathroom usually contained nothing
but a redundant wooden bath tub.
Thus, in a world where men and women possessed none of
our standards of hygiene, dirt and odour were disguised by
renewed applications of perfume, and bad skins were camou-
flaged by a cosmetic mask of potentially dangerous materials.
There was some attempt to improve the standards of hygiene
in cosmetics in 1724, when an act was passed to ensure a careful
examination of drugs. Some preparations became safer to use,
but many people still preferred the old harsh, white lead paints.
Some advertisements, however, stressed the medicinal
properties in make-up, proving that there was a market for
cosmetics which contributed to skin improvement:
 This Chrystal Cosmetick, approved of by the worthy Dr. Paul
Chamberline, viz. by washing Morning or Evening, cures all red
faces, proceeding from what cause, forever takes off all Morphew,
Pimples, and Freckles; it is of a Soft Nature, cleansing and adorning
the Face and Hands of both sexes in a very beautiful manner and
may be used with as much safety as milk, having in it no Mercury
(so frequently made use of). Price of the largest Bottle 6s. the lesser
3s. Sold at Mr. Alcrofts by Exchange Alley, Cornhill. Mr. Jackson’s
the corner of Wood Street, Cheapside. Mrs. Brecknocks, the Upper
end of St. James’ Street, Piccadilly. To prevent counterfeits each
single bottle, with directions, is tied and sealed with this Coat of
Arms a Frett with a Lion rampart in a Canton (The Tatler)

A second advertisement deals with the hands:

A most incomparable Paste for the Hands far exceeding anything

ever yet in print it makes them most delicately white, slick and
plump, fortifies them against the sharpness of the Air, or Scorching
of the Fire; A Hand cannot be so spoiled, but the constant use of this
Paste will recover it; Sold only at Mr. Alcrofts Toyshop over-
against the Royal Exchange at Is. 6d. the Pot with Directions (The
Tatler)

The wording of these advertisements suggests the exaggera-

tions of a fairground doctor, but this did not deter people
from believing in the miracle cure with its promises of pro-
curing beauty in a bottle. The hopeful belief in an instant
remedy for pimples and spots has always been a human failing
and explains the success of many charlatans in the field of
beauty.
Giuseppe Balsamo, who called himself the Count Alessandro
Cagliostro, was just such a man. He arrived in London from
the Continent in 1771 and bought a house in Whitcomb Street
where he established his laboratory. Alchemy was his speciality,
but he also manufactured love potions, cosmetics and his
famous water of life, which he claimed preserved youth and
beauty for ever.
 Charm with women helped him to sell his concoctions and
he possessed the added attraction of an aura of mystery sur-
rounding his life. An experienced medium, he dabbled in
witchcraft and astrology, all of which endeared him to the
female sex who believed that by purchasing his lotions and
ointments they were acquiring a magical recipe for beauty.
Cagliostro’s products were excessively expensive, as were
many cosmetics at this time. Prices went up still further in
1786 when a heavy purchase tax was imposed on all cosmetics
and shops retailing this commodity had to have a special
licence.
A sense of economy undoubtedly prompted many to manu-
facture cosmetics at home, although, judging by contemporary
women’s magazines, the invention of recipes for beauty was a
common art throughout this century. The ingredients used
would often have been more at home in a witch’s cauldron.
Frog’s blood, leeches and goat’s grease sound like prepara-
tions for a coven feast rather than for a compound in aid of
beauty. But there were no lengths to which an eighteenth-
century woman would not go to make herself beautiful enough
to attract a husband or lover. Men also believed that much
could be achieved by cosmetic perfection, although an amusing
letter in the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1773 discredits this belief:
‘I dress fashionably and therefore wear a great deal of powder.’
The correspondent goes on to explain that whilst visiting his
love of the moment, who has just lost her father, her mother
walks into the room to discover the two lovers sitting together
on the sofa. Her daughter’s ‘black silk gown, curse on the
mourning’ is ‘whiter than ordinary and guessing we have been
closer than we then were, she civilly desired me to walk down’.
Although extravagances in cosmetic fashions were frequently
ridiculed by members of society who were unwilling to spend
time in titivation, the majority of men and women continued
to indulge in every form of cosmetic artifice. As new ointments
and lotions were invented, so they were purchased, adding to
an ever-growing collection of pots, bottles, powders and paints.
It can be imagined that the average dressing table was littered
with cosmetic paraphernalia. There were jars of pomade and
rouge, pots of face and hair powder, crystal scent bottles and
enamelled patch boxes, a variety of home-made ointments, and
exotic cosmetic concoctions made with drugs and spices
imported from Baghdad, Turkey, Cyprus, Spain, Italy and
France {Plate 25). French cosmetics were considered the finest
and 110 dressing table was complete without a collection of
Parisian paints and powders.
A spoof advertisement for the recovery of stolen goods, in
the November 1710 issue of The Tatler, lists the contents of a
dressing table:
Seven cakes of superfine Spanish Wool, Two pairs of bran-new
plumpers, Four black-lead combs, Three pairs of fashionable Eye-
brows, Two sets of ivory teeth (little the worse for wearing), and a
collection of Receipts to make Pastes for the Hands, Pomatums, Lip
Salves, white pots, Beautifying creams, Water of Talc and Frog
Spawn water and Decoctions for cleaning the complexion.

This cosmetic equipment was undoubtedly typical of every

boudoir in town, but Alexander Pope gives a more romantic
image of the eighteenth-century boudoir in ‘The Rape of the
Lock’:
And all Arabia breathes from yonder box
The tortoise here and elephant unite
Transformed to combs, the speckled and the white
Here files of Pins extend their shining Rows,
Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet Doux.

The application of the entire fashionable cosmetic parapher-

nalia was, as may be imagined, a lengthy process: ‘My hours of
existence, on being awake are from eleven in the morning to
eleven at night, half of which I leave to myself, in picking my
 teeth, washing my hands, pairing my nails and looking in the
glass.’ (The Tatler, 1709.) Thus it became necessary to entertain
guests during the arrangement of one’s toilette for, in this way,
no time was wasted away from the social scene (Plate 26).
The latest love affairs, duels and scandals could be discussed
whilst adjusting a patch on the cheek or powdering some
extravagant coiffure.
In a social world where so much time was spent in personal
adornment, dress and cosmetic fashions acquired an exag-
gerated importance. This prompted a group of young men to
form a club whose identity depended on the way its members
dressed. The ‘Macaroni Club’ drew its membership from the
youthful elite who had done the Grand Tour of Europe; a
passing flirtation with Italian culture had given them the intel-
lectual conceit of most dilettantes. Walpole comments, ‘the
Macaroni Club is composed of all the travelled young men who
wear long curls and spying glasses’.
The ‘Macaronis’ set new fashions in dress and make-up, and
in their use of cosmetics they made an artifice out of artifice.
The elaborate care taken over the exact placing of a patch,
rouging of a cheek or tinting of a powder made the ‘Macaroni’
a joke amongst members of society who could laugh at the
follies of fashion. He was ridiculed in such farcical skits as
‘The Macaroni Dialogue’ which appeared in the Ladies
Magazine. Sir Harry Dimple, the central character, declaims,
‘It was me that first improved upon the Poudre a la Marechale
and by throwing in a dash of the violet, brought it to such high
perfection, you may always distinguish me by the peculiar
odouriferousness of my powder.’ In another issue of the Ladies
Magazine, a ‘Macaroni’ is sarcastically described as ‘A thing
that has some resemblance to a man’ but who ‘Holds his Head
up, wears his hair powdered and curled, and never goes out
till he has formed his countenance according to the rules of
the latest fashion.’
 6Macaroni’ became used to describe any man or woman who
made a fetish of their toilet. 6Methinks one of these Macaronis
of the sex, if she is capable of thinking, must be cruelly mortified
on approaching to her toilette. On seeing her tete, her pomade,
her rouge, her patch box, etc. She can hardly help saying to
herself—there is my beauty—my complexion is in that box.’
{Ladies Magazine, 1773.)
The Ladies Magazine was a vehicle for puritan opinions, but
it is obvious that it merely voiced many of the feelings of its
readers. In every age of extravagant fashions and excessive
artifice, there is an underlying movement to restore balance
and a true sense of values. The Ladies Magazine constantly
advocates that 6Natural Beauty, the agremens of dress, mental
abilities and virtues are the sources of pleasing’.
In the early part of the eighteenth century, fashionable
society paid no attention to these prudish dictates, as dress and
cosmetics were a great source of enjoyment, but towards the
end of the century there was a swing back to puritan ideals.
Young fops and their feminine counterparts were ridiculed and
criticised:

They have been told a thousand times that white robs their face
of its expression and that rouge made that bloom and freshness of
complexion disappear . . . They illuminate themselves after the
manner of the ancient Bacchanalians and render their eyes more
piercing. This custom which was in use among the most savage nations
transforms the prettiest face into a painted pagoda {Ladies' Magazine,
1773)

The puritan movement had many champions, including

Alexander Pope who described fashionable society earlier in
the century as:

Such painted Puppets, such a varnish’d Race

Of hollow Gewgaws, only Dress and Face
(4Satires of Dr John Donne’)
This harsh criticism was echoed by many people in the latter
half of the century and proof of the general revulsion against
all artifice is provided by the passing of an extraordinary act of
parliament in the year 1770. It was expressly designed to
protect men beguiled into marriage by the false adornments
of the female 6Macaroni’:
All women, of whatever age, rank, profession, or degree, whether
virgins, maids, or widows, that shall, from and after such Act,
impose upon, seduce, and betray into matrimony, any of his Majesty’s
subjects, by the scents, paints, cosmetic washes, artificial teeth,
false hair, Spanish wool, iron stays, hoops, high-heeled shoes and
bolstered hips, shall incur the penalty of the law in force against
witchcraft and like misdemeanours and that the marriage, upon
conviction, shall stand null and void.

There is no evidence that this act has ever been repealed.

The writings of such men as Rousseau had influenced society
to turn away from the excesses of fashion to a simpler way of
life. This movement was precipitated further by the French
Revolution of 1789 which marked the end of aristocratic society
in France. Paris, with its artificial, urbanised way of life, had
set the pattern for London society but, with the Revolution, this
influence ceased to exist. The English, who have always had a
deep love of the country, spent more time on their estates, and
town was no longer the centre of society life.
Fashions in dress and make-up were influenced by this change
of social scene, and the rouges, paints and powders which had
earlier seemed so attractive were now considered vulgar. Face
powder was chiefly applied to the neck. The extravagant con-
fections of powdered curls had disappeared in favour of softer
hairstyles which remained unpowdered. Rouge was out of
fashion, and 6patching’ had lost its purpose with the increasingly
successful results of smallpox inoculation. Horace Walpole,
describing a group of contemporary young men, writes, 6It
seems they now crop their hair short and wear no powder.’
 The artificial hothouse existence of mid-eighteenth century
London, with its fops and painted ladies, was at an end. An
anonymous contributor to the Gentlemen's Magazine writes
what could be taken for an epitaph of the passing age:

Dress and paint then lay aside

Of borrowed Beauty leave the Pride
Studied Art and Vain Disguise
Men admire not but Despise.
 CHAPTER EIGHT

The Nineteenth Century

Make a hole in a lemon, fill it with sugar candy, and close it

nicely with leaf gold, applied over the rind that was cut out; then
roast the lemon in hot ashes. When desirous of using the juice,
squeeze out a little through the hole already made, and wash the face
with a napkin wetted therewith. This juice is said to cleanse the skin
and brighten the complexion marvellously.
(Anon. The Art of Beauty, 1825)

The decline of extravagance in dress and cosmetic fashions

continued during the last years of the eighteenth century and
a new style of appearance evolved which heralded a return to
elegance. The painted beauties of the previous age would have
had little success in winning praise from the lips of a sophisti-
cated Regency gentleman.
The new ideal of feminine beauty is illustrated by the fashion
plates of the day. A powdered coiffure had disappeared in
favour of softly coiled black hair embellished with tendrils of
ringlets on the cheeks; large dark eyes added expressive emphasis
to a pale-complexioned face with delicately formed piquant
features (Plates 27,29). The society woman, clothed in her high-
waisted dress of soft fabric, appeared light-boned and pretty,
acting as a perfect foil for the handsome masculinity of her
escort.
An elegant appearance became essential to the ‘gentleman
of fashion’ and this was undoubtedly due to the influence
of Beau Brummell (Plate 28). Misleadingly described as a
 prince of dandies, his taste, far from being flamboyant, was
distinctive because of its restraint. His style of dress depended
on the simplicity of plain dark cloth superbly cut and tailored
to fit the figure and his immaculately groomed appearance owed
nothing to artifice but everything to his insistence on scrupulous
cleanliness. Brummell never used cosmetic paints on his face,
but immersed it in fresh water every morning, alternately
scrubbing and rinsing it to tone up the complexion. Following
his example, many society men abandoned even the slightest
hint of powder or rouge and, although a few painted dandies
still walked furtively down Bond Street, they were exceptions
to the general rule.
Brummell’s toilette was the subject of endless gossip and
many of these stories were spread round town by Brummell
himself. It was rumoured that he sent all his laundry to the
country so that when his linen returned to London it was scented
by the fresh smell of fields and flowers. He was reputed to shave
his face several times and pluck out any remaining hairs with
tweezers. He employed three hairdressers: ‘The first is respon-
sible for my temples, the second for the front and the third for
the occiput.’
He was a notable influence on the Prince Regent whose taste
in heavy flower perfumes changed to the use of a light cologne
favoured by Brummell. As a result delicate scents became
fashionable and therefore the unpleasant odour of an unwashed
body could no longer be camouflaged by the aroma of a strong
perfume. This encouraged bathing as a regular daily habit,
although many members of society still regarded cleanliness
with suspicion. The elderly Duke of Norfolk could only be
washed when he was too drunk to be aware of the experience.
Hair had also to be cleaned more frequently as powder was
no longer used to disguise a dirty head. A powdered coiffure
had become unfashionable since the French Revolution and
Brummell is reputed to have bought himself out of the army
 THE ARTIFICIAL FACE

because officers were still expected to whiten their curls arti-

ficially. Pitt’s heavy tax on hair powder also contributed to the
end of this fashion, although Lord William Murray, son of the
Duke of Atholl, attempted to evade the tax by taking out a
patent to manufacture powder from horse chestnuts. Society
men of the day were so determined to avoid taxation that they
ceased to wear their hair long, tied back and powdered. 6Such
is the universal disgust at the powder tax, that many thousands
of the male sex have already sacrificed their favorite curls to
disappoint the rapacity of a minister’. (6Peter Pindar’, 1816.)
The tax was also extremely unpopular with women who still
hankered after the unfashionable whitened coiffures of a past
age:

Lo, the poor girl, whom carrot-colour shocks,

Pines pennyless, and blushes for her locks.
Refus’d to fly to powder’s friendly aid,
She bids them seek in caps the secret shade;
No ringlets now around her neck to wave,
Phillis must hid the redd’ning shame or shave!
At thee she flings her curses, Pitt, and cries—
At thee she darts the lightnings of her eyes;
And thinks that love ne’er warm’d him who could vex
With wanton strokes of cruelty, the sex.
(‘Peter Pindar’)

The lack of powdered curls, however, was responsible for

the charming appearance of Regency ladies, and the natural
locks favoured by men also became fashionable for women.
This aversion for artifice was to continue through most of
the nineteenth century and, although a sparing use of powder
and rouge may have enhanced the complexion, brightly coloured
dyes were considered vulgar.
Cosmetics made from herbs, flowers, vegetable fats and oils
replaced those harmful concoctions of the eighteenth century,
which had attempted to disguise a defective skin under a thick
28 (right) Beau Brummell.
Engraving from a portrait
miniature. Brummett's
style of appearance,
which depended on
immaculate grooming
and scrupulous
cleanliness, was copied
by every Regency
gentleman of fashion.

29 (below left) Regency

fashion plate. The
contemporary ideal of
beauty was far removed
from that of the
eighteenth-century.
Dark-haired women with
pretty, piquant, natural
looks were favoured.

30 (below right) A lady at

the court of St James.
Head and shoulders
detail. The Victorian
ideal of femininity
depended on an
untouched, childlike
appearance, soft ringlets
and a virtuous manner.
 THE TEMPLE OF BEAUTY.
Miss Fortescue.
Mad. Marie Roze.
Mad. Adelina Patil. Miss Mary Anderson.
Mrs. Langtry.
ALL the above Beautiful Women have honoured Messrs. FEARS with
their witters testimony to the excellence of PEARS’ SOAP
FOR IMPROVING THE HANDS AND COMPLEXION.

31 (above left) Label for

Rowland’s ,Kalydor for
Improving and Beautifying
the Complexion’.
32 (above right) Advertising
leaflet for Pears’ soap. Cover
illustration showing several
well-known beauties of the
day, including Lily Langtry,
issuing from the ‘Temple of
Beauty’. Pears were well
ahead of their time with their
ideas on advertising.
33 (left) Sarah Bernhardt.
Famous actress and beauty,
whose profile Oscar Wilde
likened to that on a Roman
coin, she used a kohl-like
make-up to emphasise her
eyes and a great deal of
white face powder. She
rouged her lips in public, a
habit almost unprecedented
in the 1880s.
 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

mask of paint, and this emphasis on natural ingredients en-

couraged the art of home-made beauty. As a result many books
were written at this period, inviting the housewife to manufac-
ture her own toilet preparations. A good example of one of
these works was The Art of Beauty. Published anonymously in
1825, during George IV’s reign, it illustrates the new approach
to cosmetics which aimed at improving the natural condition
of the skin instead of artificially camouflaging its faults.
Stress is laid on the importance of cleanliness: 6Bathing along
with friction is an essential part of beauty-training, for clearing
the skin of its impurities, and giving transparency and freshness
to the complexion.’ Steam baths were particularly recom-
mended for this purpose and the anonymous writer’s recipe for
one of these, using steaming kettles, pipes and a large blanket,
would have inspired Heath Robinson.
A variety of lotions, ointments, washes and salves were
suggested for use after bathing and these all purported to
enhance the true beauty of a natural complexion. A pale skin
was still fashionable so that many of the recipes were designed
to prevent sunburn or erase freckles; these concoctions were
made from such ingredients as horse radish, sour milk, rain
water, lavender and appetizing mixtures of cream, sugar, lemon
and grapes.
Although the book states that 6When a person is young, and
fresh, and handsome, to paint would be perfectly ridiculous’,
the writer grudgingly admits that 6art can often perform
wonders, which could not, by the uninitiated, be conceived to
be within the limits of possibility’. Thus, a subtle rouge was
recommended for use on the face, but lip colouring was
obviously considered undesirable and vulgar. Vegetable rouges
made from red sandalwood, cochineal, brazil wood and saffron
mixed with talc powder were favoured, instead of red lead dyes
which contained sulphur and mercury, and home-made prepara-
tions were considered preferable to purchased concoctions.
Exceptions were ‘Portuguese rouge’, contained in china dishes
and only genuine if imported from Portugal; 4Spanish wool’,
in cakes about 4the size and thickness of a crown-piece’, the
best variety of which was manufactured by Jews in London, and
4Spanish papers’, which misleadingly came from China.
4Chinese Boxes of colours’ were also considered safe and harm-
less, and they were possibly the first examples of 4make-up
palettes’ to be found in England. These japanned boxes con-
tained twenty-four papers each enveloping three smaller papers,
one for the eyebrows, impregnated with a black substance;
another for rouging the cheeks, and lastly a paper containing
half an ounce of white powder made from ground pearls.
Pearl white was extremely popular at this period, and talc,
which had replaced white lead as a face blanche, was considered
an excellent alternative. The toxic properties of metallic-based
paints had finally been discovered through the advances made
in chemical analysis, but the author of The Art of Beauty
nevertheless warned his readers that home-made powder was
safer than any which could be bought in the shops.
The patience of the home beautician must have been prodi-
gious, as she was expected to manufacture her own dentifrices
and mouth washes, eye lotions, lip salves and even depilatories.

Depilatory Vegetable Essence

Take polypody of the oak, cut into very small pieces, and put a
quantity into a glass cucurbit. Pour on this as much Lisbon or
French white wine as will rise an inch above the ingredients, and
digest it in a hot water or vapour bath for twenty four hours.

An alternative recipe suggests that 4the distilled water of the

leaves and roots of celandine, is said to have a similar effect;
and likewise, oil of walnuts’.
Hair pomades, oils, cleansers and dyes occupy an important
place among cosmetic recipes, and many of these preparations
 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

seem to be based on the ancient natural remedies of the Middle

Ages and Elizabethan England. ‘Lye’, made from ashes, was
recommended as a ‘shampoo’, bear’s grease as a pomade, and
juice of nettles and herbs as a conditioner. A hair bleach
suggested the use of ‘a quart of lye prepared from the ashes of
vine-twigs, briony, celandine-roots, and turmeric, of each half
an ounce; saffron and lily-roots, of each two drachms; flowers
of mullein, yellow stechas, broom and St John’s Wort, of each
a drachm’. (The Art of Beauty?)
The home-made cosmetic continued to be the main aid to
beauty when Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837 and
numerous books on the subject were published during her reign.
The increasing number of women’s journals supplied their
readers with toiletry recipes and articles on beauty, which were
sandwiched between household hints on how to make Scotch
marmalade or wash cotton, and romantic stories and poems
entitled ‘The Midshipman’s Farewell’ and ‘The Soul’s Ideal’.
However, the Victorian image of feminine beauty demanded
less of cosmetics, whether home-made or purchased, than ever
before; by comparison, the ladies of Regency and Georgian
England were positively liberal in their use of toilet prepara-
tions. The perfect Victorian woman is idealised in the fashion
prints of the day and described in contemporary novels (Plate
30). She possessed the innocent face of a china doll, with a
rosebud mouth, dimpled cheeks and small neat features framed
by a demure hairstyle of ringlets. Charles Dickens’ description
of David Copperfield’s child bride, Dora, with her ingenuous
manner, her blushes and curls, would have won the heart of
any Victorian man: ‘I never saw such curls—how could I, for
there never were such curls!—as those she shook out to hide
her blushes’.
The preference for a child-like, untouched prettiness meant
that women had to resort to subterfuge if they wished to use
cosmetics which artificially coloured their complexions. Rouge
 and powder were applied so sparingly, with a hare’s foot or a
camel hair brush, that they could scarcely be noticed; and lip
salves, which cunningly concealed a touch of carmine, could
only be used with the excuse of moistening chapped lips.
Washing with soap and hot water was now thought to be the
best aid to beauty that any woman needed to improve her
appearance, and there is no doubt that in Victorian England
cleanliness was considered a virtue second only to godliness.
Daily bathing became an established routine in upper and
middle class households, and although bathrooms, as such, only
made their appearance towards the end of the century, hip
baths in the bedroom were an adequate alternative which even
Queen Victoria made use of in Buckingham Palace.
The fetish for cleanliness led to the construction of public
baths and wash houses, provided with hot and cold water; the
city of Liverpool built the first of its kind in England in 1842.
In 1846 parliament passed an act encouraging other cities to
follow this example and also providing a scale of approved
charges for the poor and higher income groups, which indicates
that these baths were for general use.
As a further aid to cleanliness, the manufacture of soaps had
become a thriving industry in Victorian England and, once the
heavy tax of threepence on every pound of soap had been
halved in 1833 and repealed by Gladstone twenty years later,
everybody could afford to buy it. By the middle of the century
there were factories in London, Liverpool, Bristol and other
cities and approximately 136 million lb of soap were manu-
factured every year. This article of toiletry had a special section
devoted to it at the Great Exhibition of 1851; in spite of foreign
competition, British soaps won seven of the prize medals, and
Yardley and Statham acquired an honourable mention for their
Old Brown Windsor soap. The excellent reputation which
English manufacturers enjoyed abroad led to the adoption of
the brand name 6Windsor Soap’ by many foreign factories,
 Fig 22 Prize-winning ‘Windsor’ soap, English, nineteenth century

including a Polish firm who used it for their finest quality

product.
Perfumery also occupied an important place at the Great
Exhibition. The English firm, Gibbs, introduced the first
perfumed toilet soap and British manufacturers won two prize
medals for their scents and one for artificial essences. Foreign
exhibitors came from all over the world; there were displays
of exotic scents from the Middle East and sophisticated per-
fames from France, while John Maria Farina’s cologne was
exhibited by means of a spectacular fountain. Parisian scents
were considered the finest and won many prizes, including an
honourable mention for the perfumery of Eugene Rimmel, a

Fig 23 ‘Oxford Lavender’ scent bottles of gilt and enamel decoration,

imported from Europe in large quantities during the nineteenth century
man whose name was to become famous in the cosmetic
industry. English perfumiers could not compete with those of
the Continent and, although as a light scent Yardley’s lavender
water enjoyed a good reputation abroad, France produced a
much greater variety of perfumes.
In 1855, in his book The Art of Perfumery, a chemist named
Septimus Piesse tried to revolutionise the English perfume
 Fig 25 ‘Exquisita’ eau de cologne bottle,
English, late nineteenth century

industry. He wrote appealing to British horticulturists and

perfumiers to unite their expertise in an effort to loosen the
French hold on the market. With all the commercial optimism
of the true Victorian, he suggested that the vast resources of the
Empire could be employed to contribute to this enterprise.
Many of the colonies had ideal temperatures and climates for
the cultivation of flowers, and they also had natural sources of
ingredients which could be used in the manufacture of scent.
He had already encouraged his brother Charles, colonial
secretary for Western Australia, to establish flower farms in this
region, but his brother’s death and a general lack of confidence
in his enterprising ideas meant that unfortunately they never
came to fruition.
The Victorian sense of commercial adventure and the increas-
ing respectability of trade encouraged the growth of advertising.
Numerous advertisements for toilet preparations were carried
by magazines and also began to appear on posters. In 1(888,
Pears created a sensation by purchasing 6Bubbles’, the famous
painting by Millais, for reproduction as a poster to advertise
their soap, and other soap manufacturers, like Sunlight, swiftly
followed this example by employing the talents of well-known
artists for their advertisements. But the most persistent adver-
tisers of toiletry throughout the century were Rowlands, whose
Kalydor and Macassar oil enjoyed nation-wide popularity
{Plates 31, 32).
Macassar oil was chiefly employed by men to dress their hair
and it led to the design of anti-macassar cloths for the backs of
chairs to protect upholstery from grease stains. Home-made
recipes for this pomade were numerous and the unfortunate
housewife was obviously expected to concoct toilet preparations
for her husband as well as for herself. Shaving soaps and after-
shave lotions with such pleasant sounding names as 6Cherry
Laurel Water’ fill the pages of 6home beauty’ books, evidence
that the Victorian man was very particular about his personal
grooming. Dandies of the age prided themselves on their
luxuriant moustaches or elegant beards. They even on occasion
used hair dyes. Disraeli is known to have dyed his hair and he
is believed to have commented on the fact that Lords
Malmesbury, Palmerston and Lyndhurst employed rouge to
embellish their appearance. This practice was reputed to be not
uncommon among high-ranking army officers, who were
notorious dandies.
 Although the Victorian man could blatantly use cosmetic
devices, women of the day had to disguise any attempts at self-
improvement. The prudery of contemporary moral standards
was totally prohibitive as far as female vanity was concerned,
but in spite of these restrictions many women attempted to find
secret ways of improving on nature.
The need for absolute secrecy in the pursuit of beauty
explains the success of an extraordinary charlatan, Sarah Rachel
Leverson, who traded under the name of 4Madame Rachel’. In
1863 she opened her salon at 47a, New Bond Street, with the
inviting legend ‘Beautiful For Ever’ displayed above the door.
Although this brazen approach to beauty indicated a certain
lack of delicacy, her customers were assured of her complete
discretion in guarding their identity from any publicity. Her
advertising manifesto was dramatically worded: ‘Beautiful for
ever! Yes, beautiful for ever! Lovely as the bright sunshine at
morning’s dawn, beautiful as the dew-drops on the flowers, so
beautiful is lovely Woman! . . . Who has shown the civilized
world, and the greatest nation of it, how wise and good has
ever been the influence of beautiful Woman? Our glorious and
beloved Queen, who bright and beautiful, came forth to the
nation in her young and lovely girlhood’. However, her praises
for womankind’s natural virtues and beauty become tempered
with such remarks as, ‘How frequently we find that a slight
blemish on the face, otherwise divinely beautiful, has occasioned
a sad and solitary life of celibacy—unloved, unblessed and
ultimately unwept and unremembered’. But she assures her
readers that her expertise as a beautician and consultant to the
Sultana of Turkey will render them immune from this unfortu-
nate end.
Her cosmetics were so prohibitively expensive that only
women with a substantial purse could afford her prices. These
preparations had exotic names, such as ‘Circassian Beauty
Wash’, ‘Armenian Liquid for Removing Wrinkles’, ‘Favorite of
the Harem’s Pearl White’, 6Chinese Leaves for the Cheeks and
Lips’, 6Magnetic Rock Dew Water of the Sahara’ and 6Senses
of Peace’, and they were priced at one to two guineas a con-
tainer. Madame Rachel’s scale of charges rose abruptly with the
sale of 6Jordan Water’ and 6Venus’s Toilet’, each costing ten to
twenty guineas per bottle, and reached its peak with 6The Royal
Arabian Toilet of Beauty’, a course of baths priced at one
hundred to a thousand guineas. Although her cosmetics pur-
ported to be made from rare herbs and ingredients imported
from the East, the materials used for their manufacture were
of humble origins and the famous Arabian baths consisted of a
mixture of bran and hot water.
The end of Madame Rachel’s career was in sight when she
resorted to blackmailing the widow of an Indian army officer
into paying the large sum of £1,400. The ensuing court case
took the country by storm, as the national Press devoted a great
deal of space to the legal proceedings which, judging from the
transcript of the trial, were frequently hilariously amusing.
They also aroused a fiercely righteous indignation in the
contemporary public, who were no doubt delighted when
Madame Rachel received the heavy sentence of five years’ penal
servitude.
Although beauty establishments were thrown into disrepute
by this infamous charlatan, in 1886 Mrs Frances Hemming
opened a salon in London which sold her toilet preparations
under the brand name of Cyclax. Her cosmetics were expensive,
but their fine quality gained her an exclusive clientele, who
arrived discreetly veiled in their carriages at the door of the
salon and were ushered in secrecy to private cubicles where
they could enjoy a beauty treatment without fear of publicity.
Towards the end of the century women began to liberate
themselves from the mental confines of a restrictive outlook and
the woman of personality emerged to replace the demure
innocent of the earlier Victorian period. The bevy of attractive
and talented actresses who delighted London audiences at this
time helped to create this different image of feminine beauty.
Sarah Bernhardt became the idol of the day, encouraging such
diverse creative talents as Swinburne and Burne Jones to use her
as their inspiration {Plate 33). Oscar Wilde likened her profile
to that on a Roman coin, and a contemporary critic wrote, 6She
has one of those delicate, expressive heads that the illuminators
of the Middle Ages painted in the miniatures of their manu-
scripts. Deep, shining, liquid eyes, a straight fine nose, red lips
that open like a flower revealing the sharp whiteness of the
teeth, a long flexible neck . . (Theodore de Banville.)
Sarah Bernhardt made ample use of cosmetic artifice even
outside the theatre. 6While talking to Henry [Irving] she took
some red stuff out of her bag and rubbed it on her lips. This
frank 66making-up” in public was a far more astonishing thing
in the 80’s than it would be now’. (Ellen Terry.) Bernhardt
applied her carmine lip dye with a badger hair brush and from
contemporary photographs it is obvious that she used a great
deal of white powder and a kohl-like eye make-up.
Ellen Terry’s daily use of cosmetics was restricted to darken-
ing her brows and powdering her face—a habit which the
impresario Charles Reade tried to break by teasingly referring
to her powder puff as 6old chalky’.
The beautiful Jersey actress, Lily Langtry, who also employed
artifice, had the distinction of having her fair hair dyed ebony
black by the Austrian court hairdresser and his royal master,
Crown Prince Rudolf, who was to shock the world a few
months later by committing suicide with his mistress at
Mayerling. The prince had been an ardent admirer of Lily
Langtry, so that when she declared her boredom with her own
hair colour, he had responded only too readily. However, the
black dye was unreliable and, after the first wash, her own
blonde colouring emerged between stripes of vivid heliotrope,
and her hair had to be concealed under a wig.
 Many contemporary women began to turn to the use of
artifice as an aid to beauty. Although this may have been in
part due to the example set by their favourite actresses, the
relaxing of a strict moral climate enabled women to use
cosmetics without fear of social censure. Rouged cheeks became
more obvious, but lip colouring was still unusual; eyes were
enhanced with shadows of kohl made from powdered chalk;
lashes were thickened with coconut oil and darkened with ‘lamp
black’ mascara, and nails were lightly coloured with scented
red oil and polished with a chamois leather cloth. Home-made
beauty preparations were still popular, but an increasing number
of purchased cosmetics found their way to the dressing table.
Oscar Wilde comments, in A Woman of No Importance, that
there were only two kinds of women in society at this time ‘the
plain and the coloured’, and a contemporary undergraduate,
Max Beerbohm, writes: ‘Nay, but it is useless to protest.
Artifice must queen it once more in town. . .’ (In Defence of
Cosmetics, 1896.) Beerbohm welcomes the return of cosmetics
as he hopes that an absorption with vanity will replace the
growing female interest in masculine sports, such as tennis,
golf and cycling, and literary pursuits involving the energetic
use of a typewriter. ‘With bodily activity their powder will fly,
their enamel crack’. However, in spite of his apparent approval
of cosmetics, he writes with a certain sad nostalgia: ‘For behold!
The Victorian era comes to its end and the day of sancta
simplicitas is quite ended. The old signs are here and the
portents to warn the seer of life that we are ripe for a new
epoch of artifice. Are not men rattling the dice-box and ladies
dipping their fingers in the rouge-pot?’
 CHAPTER NINE

The Twentieth Century

1899-1945

Beauty, in the old days, used to float into the world like Botticelli’s
Venus on a shell, natural, breath-taking, divine. Beauty, to-day, is
made from baser metals by an astonishing alchemy totally of our
time. (Vogue's Book of Beauty, 1933)

The new tolerance of cosmetic artifice as an aid to beauty had

an increasing effect on the toilet habits of Englishwomen during
the final years of Queen Victoria’s reign. The era of soap and
water, and modest applications of home-made face creams, was
certainly at an end.

‘Make-up’ seems to become almost a passion with most women

who indulge in it to any extent. There is little room for doubt that
the ‘art’ is largely on the increase. A chemist only the other day
remarked to me how much the practice had grown of late. ‘Quite
young girls come in now,’ he said, ‘and ask for powder, and even
rouge and eyebrow pencils, without the least embarrassment’.
(The Art of Beauty: A Book for Women and Girls, 1899)

However, in spite of this contemporary evidence, young girls

would undoubtedly have only dared to paint their faces in the
privacy of the home or at a select gathering of female friends
belonging to their own generation. Society might give its
approval to the use of powder and rouge by older women, but
unmarried girls were expected to rely on the natural attributes
of an unpainted complexion. Thus, social mores to a large
extent dictated that the ideal of female beauty, later to become
fashionable during the Edwardian period, depended on the
sophisticated attractions of the mature women who could,
without fear of censure, use cosmetic artifice to create the
popular image of feminine good looks.
The understated childlike appearance favoured during the
early years of Victoria’s reign was replaced in the Edwardian
era by a preference for the voluptuous, Junoesque beauty of a
curvaceous figure, generously bosomed, and a well-rounded
face with an almost florid milk and roses complexion. This
chocolate-box prettiness was further enhanced by tiny frizzed
curls which covered the forehead and by ample tresses of corn-
coloured hair piled up under the shadow of an exotic plumed
hat.
Women’s highly tinted skin tones, which can be seen in the
prints and paintings of the day, were largely created by generous
applications of rouge contrasting with the chalky whiteness of
powder. Most Edwardian society ladies went in for ‘enamelling’,
as making-up was described at the time, and Queen Alexandra
set her seal of royal approval on the fashion by painting her
face as liberally as any of her contemporaries.
Cecil Beaton allows one a glimpse of the Edwardian woman’s
cosmetic toilette in his book, The Glass of Fashion. He describes
a childhood visit to his Aunt Jessie, wife of an influential
Bolivian minister, whom he finds ‘standing in front of a cheval
glass, her hair already arranged and the plumes fixed in place,
her face a mask of powder and rouge’. The fact that his father
apparently disapproved of Aunt Jessie’s use of cosmetics
rendered them even more ‘delightfully shocking’ to the small
boy, who never ceased to be intrigued by the sight of his
favourite aunt with her neck, arms, back and face covered in
thick paint—‘which by some was called enamel but which my
 family referred to as whitewash’—her eyelids painted mauve,
her cheeks carnation and her lips cerise.
But the unfamiliar practice of making-up was still a mystery
to many society ladies and, although they applied powder and
rouge to their faces, these embellishments were often amateurish
in effect. However, in the new relaxed atmosphere of the
Edwardian era, a breed of women emerged in society whose
entire livelihood depended on an immaculate appearance. The
high-class courtesans, or demi-mondaines, soon learnt that the
art of making-up was a vitally important part of their way of
life. Many of these women were not strictly beautiful, but they
made every effort to improve on nature with a clever use of
cosmetics applied in an unusual or individual fashion to suit
their particular type of face. They dressed expensively, lived in
fine houses and were accomplished in the art of conversation
and entertainment. They provided a familiar sight at social
gatherings, and could be seen in the London parks exercising
elegant Borzoi dogs which complemented their own carefully-
studied style of appearance.
The courtesan’s expertise with powder and paint must have
set an example to many well-born ladies of society, whose dis-
approval of the demi-mondaine was no doubt tinged with envy
for their apparent mastery over beauty. This skill with make-up
was shared by the actresses of the period. This was the age of
operetta and music hall entertainment, and the stage produced
many attractive, vivacious stars who enhanced their features
with artful applications of theatrical paint. Dancer and actress
Gabrielle Ray employed face-shaping techniques, shading her
features with mushroom-coloured powder and defining her
chin with a light dusting of terracotta applied with a hare’s foot.
Her cheeks were tinted with ‘Bois de rose’ and coral rouge; the
corners of her eyes and nostrils were emphasised with dots of
red, green or mauve paint. Gaby Deslys, another star of the
day, blanched her face to the colour of a marshmallow and
dyed her cheeks magenta. Her lips were carmined and her eyes
were shadowed with turquoise powder which was rendered
even more startling by the heavy black mascara on her lashes.
The exaggerated make-up employed by an actress for her stage
appearances was tempered down for daily life and provided
other women with an example of how to use cosmetics to
achieve a positive effect.
The theatre had a very definite influence on everyday make-up
in the early 1900s when Diaghilev’s Russian ballet took London
by storm. Society was as thrilled with the exciting sets and
costumes designed by Leon Bakst as they were with the brilliant
choreography and dancing. In particular, the ballet ‘Shehera-
zade’ {Plate 34) created a sensation which led to such a craze
for orientalism that society ladies entertained their guests by
posing in Tableaux vivants’ dressed as slave girls. The Eastern
influence had an immediate effect on toiletry. Two famous
Guerlain perfumes date from this time; ‘Shalimar’ came on the
market in 1916 and ‘Mitsouko’ in 1919. Both were musky,
oriental scents and many other toilet preparations of the day
were‘ designed to simulate the exotic properties of Eastern
cosmetics. The dramatic stage make-up of the Russian dancers
started a craze for coloured or even gilded eye shadows and
these were used to match daring evening dresses by French
couturier Paul Poiret, who based his designs and vivid colour
schemes on Bakst’s stage costumes {Plate 35), The Diaghilev
ballet was to have a lasting influence on cosmetics. From that
period to the present day, tinted eye shadows have been on the
market and the craze for gilded oriental eye-paint is one which
constantly recurs.
The growing respectability of the beauty establishment and
the general acceptance of cosmetics made it unnecessary for
women of the late Edwardian era to continue manufacturing
toilet preparations at home. Whereas in the early years of the
century face powders were still being concocted from starch,
 34{right) Mme Lubov
Tchernicheva as
'Sheherazade’. The ballet
started a craze for
orientalism in the early
1900s and the exotic
stage eye make-up,
illustrated in this
photograph, created a
vogue for coloured and
even gilded eyeshadows.

35 {below left) Edwardian

evening dress. Reproduced
from a Harrods fashion
catalogue. The hairstyles
decorated with plumes and
pearls show the influence
on fashion of Diaghilev’s
Eastern ballets.

36 (below right) Elizabeth

Arden advertisement of
the 1920s. The face in
this photograph ideally
represents the look of
this period. The hair is
cropped short in a smooth
bob, the eyes are enhanced
with a kohl-like make-up;
the brows plucked, and
the mouth painted a
deep, vivid shade.

cAn Elizabeth Arden Treatmmt

Says Elizabeth Arden

Cltanstng Cream with upward lifting Strokes. With juSt the

warmth of rhe skin thjs pure light cream melts into the
pores, where it dissolves and dislodges all the impurities
which dog them, leaving the skin fresh, soft and supple. Then
pat with Aretetea Siia Toteic to tone, firm ami whiten the skin.
VENETIAN CLEANSING CREAM 4S, «<>. Ufe
ARWENA SKIN TONIC 3 6.8 6, 16 6
Write for Biasberh Arden s book. " The Quefi «/'eh, '
ELIZABETH ARDEN
NEW YORK. tCS Fifth Ateaiw LONSX3N MC. CM Street PARIS 2, «wU
T»la ...Um mart
37 Greta Garbo. Her cool, sophisticated appearance epitomises the 1930s’ ideal of beauty
which she helped to create. Pale, unrouged cheeks were fashionable: lipstick shades were less
vivid and the line of dark pencil used to emphasise the lid of the eye was Garbo*s innovation.
flour, talc and French chalk, and one beauty book of 1899 even
suggested beetroot juice as a rouge for the cheeks, ladies were
now determined to rely on the ingenuity of the professional
beautician to provide them with a comprehensive range of
toiletry. However, although cosmetic manufacturers made every
effort to comply with the new demand for a variety of make-up
preparations, it was only at a later date that they were totally
successful in this respect. Numerous brands of soap and
perfume appeared on the market, but cold cream and vanishing
cream seem to have been the only concoctions designed for the
complexion. Eye shadows, rouge and face powder were pro-
duced in only a small range of tints. ‘Papier Poudre’ in pale
pink or mauve was popular, while the white shades and ‘Poudre
de Riz’, made from rice powder, were used as face blanches.
Carmine was still the favourite form of rouge.
The new delight in cosmetic artifice focused attention on the
head and on the decolletage. The bold bosom then in fashion
was frequently emphasised with artificial shadows of powder in
the cleavage, whilst delicately etched veins of pale blue paint
simulated the perfection of a naturally translucent breast. The
purpose of this was to enhance the mature womanliness of the
subject; the softly coiled hairstyles gave additional emphasis to
femininity.
In the Edwardian period, hair was indeed a woman’s crown-
ing glory and, where nature was lacking, artificial padding and
false postiches supplemented the deficiency. Blonde or red-gold
tresses were once more in vogue and quantities of false locks
were imported from Scandinavian and Breton villages, where
unfortunate peasant girls were paid a pittance for their hair.
Dyes were resorted to by many women who were not naturally
fair yet wished to accord with the fashionable ideal of the
moment. The effect created by these colouring agents, which
were manufactured from henna and cobalt extracts, was any-
thing but subtle or unobtrusive. Even Winston Churchill, when
 President of the Board of Trade in 1909, remarked during a
society wedding that "seemingly not one woman in ten can do
without hair dye’ and he thought the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, Lloyd George, should tax this commodity as it
would "yield a vast income’.
The elaborate nature of contemporary hairstyles made a
woman dependent on the skill of her maid or on the expertise
of a professional hairdresser. Although private visits from the
latter were favoured at this time, hairdressing salons were
beginning to make an appearance in London. Advances in
chemistry had provided these establishments with a range of
reliable shampoos, which were a pleasant change from the home-
made concoctions of egg used at the turn of the century; but
the curling equipment employed on the premises was undeniably
primitive.
In 1908, however, M. Marcel from France introduced his
famous "Marcel Wave’, which revolutionised hairdressing tech-
niques in England. These were further improved by Karl
Nessler’s invention of "permanent waving’, then in its infancy
but later to become a perfected and reliable form of curling
process.
The outbreak of war in 1914 had an immediate effect on
women’s hairstyles and changed the ideal of feminine beauty.
Even before the war, suffragette sympathisers and female
intellectuals had attempted to convince their contemporaries
that long hair was a symbol of feminine bondage, but it was
only when women began to contribute to the war effort by
working in factories that, for purely practical reasons, they
allowed their hair to be cropped short. Long hair had an un-
fortunate habit of coming adrift from its pins and combs and
falling into factory machinery, which both endangered the life
of the individual and halted the production line. As for the
luxurious coiffures of the leisured age now past, these had
no place in wartime England where many women abandoned
domestic service to seek work in factories, leaving their former
employers with the impossible task of coping with their own
long tresses.
World War I accelerated the process of women’s emanci-
pation. War work in factories made women realise that the
home was not the only place for feminine talents and they now
sought positions in commerce and the professions. Class barriers
had also, to some extent, disintegrated during the war, as men
and women of different social backgrounds worked together
for the common good. The new position that women felt they

Fig 26 Toilet-water bottle of

moulded glass with etched surface
and blue-green enamel decoration
in the recesses of the design,
Lalique, c 1920
Fig 27 Long-handled powder puffs for powdering the back or face, one of
swansdown and satin with chromium-plated telescopic handle, c 1930; the
other of pink velvet with enamelled porcelain head of a pierrette on pink
and black ribbon-covered handle, c 1925-30

had acquired in society and the difference in social atmosphere

had a profound effect on their looks. Make-up was more widely
used than ever before. During the war the working-class girl
had come into contact with the cosmetic fashions of the upper
classes, and an extensive distribution of reasonably priced
toiletry in the shops of post-war England allowed women from
every social background to paint their faces according to the
fashionable ideals of the day. As a result women’s looks became
standardised into a classless form of appearance.
Female emancipation, paradoxically, inspired women to make
greater use of cosmetics. Although these were applied with a
higher degree of art and subtlety, this was quite blatantly done
in public. Husbands and menfolk generally were appalled at
the sight of their wives and girl friends wielding a powder puff
outside the privacy of their own homes but, while women’s
magazines appealed to their readers to show more appreciation
of masculine sensitivity, the habit of making-up in public was
here to stay.
Men were to sustain yet another shock to their sensibilities
 Fig 28 Manicure set on
glass base with plated
metal stand supporting
a bevelled oval mirror,
framed in tortoiseshell,
and with hooks for
suspending the manicure
tools, c 1920

with the advent of a new cosmetic fashion. ‘A form of make-up

which has become deplorably obvious of late is that of rouging
the lips. No effort is made to be sparing with the use of the
lip-stick. The fashion has come from Paris, of course. It is a
pity, because it goes directly against all the canons of successful
make-up’. (Rita Strauss, The Beauty Book, 1924.) After many
years of exile from the world of fashion, vivid lip colouring
made its debut in the 1920s and became the most popular form
of cosmetic used at the time. The new young generation of
Fig 29 Vanity case in gilt metal with compartments for rouge, powder,
comb, lipstick, cigarettes, matches and stamps, Japan, early 1930s

women—the 6flappers’ or ‘bright young things’ of the twenties

—used their scarlet lipsticks in a deliberate and, it seems,
successful attempt to shock their elders. They were determined
in every way to mark themselves out as a generation apart and,
even if their originality depended on such trivialities as the use
of make-up, this served their purpose. Parental opposition
gradually gave way, however, as mothers, determined to keep
up with the style of the times, adopted the cosmetic fashions
of their daughters.
The new ideal of beauty was dependent on two items of
make-up—the lipstick and the eyebrow pencil. Bright artificial
colouring was used to paint a 6cupid’s bow’ shape over the
natural form of the mouth, and a thin arched line was pencilled
over the eyebrow, which had been either extensively plucked or
completely depilated (Plate 36). When the cupid’s bow became
unfashionable, pencilled brows began to get more exaggerated
and resembled the winged antennae of some strange insect.
Eyebrow pencil was also used to simulate a patch by turning a
mole on the face into a painted beauty spot.
The foundation for these cosmetic conceits was still a white
complexion emphasised by pale pink powder with a touch of
rouge on the cheeks. Eyelids were coloured for evening or
 glossed with lanolin during the day; lashes were darkened with
mascara, and drops of belladonna made from deadly nightshade
added a sparkle to the whites of the eye. A framework for the
contemporary face was provided by a cropped bob of hair
which might well have been dyed to a pale platinum with the
aid of one of the latest blonde bleaches.
Essentially, the new style of looks was one which suited a
youthful face and figure. The Junoesque form of the Edwardian
lady was now out of date; indeed, she would have had a great
deal of trouble in squeezing her ample curves into the knee-
length, flat-bodiced dresses which were the rage of the moment.
It was unfortunate for the older woman that her mature
attractions were never again to become truly fashionable.
Whereas in the Edwardian era young women had vainly tried
to make themselves look older, from the 1920s to the present
day women have endeavoured to look permanently young in
a world where youth and beauty are thought to be synonymous.
The rapid transition from the matronly physique of the
Edwardian lady to the slight proportions of the 6flapper’ was
due, according to some fashion historians, to the heavy loss of
men’s lives during the war. Young women of the twenties with
their youthful faces and boyish figures thus replaced the men
who had been killed in battle.
The new desire for a young appearance encouraged cosmetic
manufacturers and beauty salons to produce a range of prepa-
rations and treatments designed to erase wrinkles, discourage
double chins and generally preserve a youthful complexion.
Helena Rubinstein, who had established her salon in London
in 1908, contributed a number of creams and lotions for this
purpose; Cyclax produced a variety of 6Reducing Fluids’, 6New
Muscle Restorers’, forehead straps and chin straps; and
Canadian beautician Elizabeth Arden opened her London
salon in 1922, introducing Englishwomen to a selection of
special creams for different skin types. Her 6Vienna Youth
 Masque’ treatment was a particular favourite with women dur-
ing the 1920s. This involved casting plaster replicas of the
individual face, after which padded masks were hand-made
from the moulds. The masks were electrically wired and the
treatment was a form of short-wave therapy which cost sixty
guineas.
Face-lifting, as a means of rejuvenation, came into fashion
with a vengeance during the twenties and, although plastic
surgery was in an elementary stage of development, the experi-
ence gleaned from operations on scarred soldiers after the war
was to prove an invaluable aid to the advance of cosmetic
surgery. Dentists added their expertise to the skill of the plastic
surgeon and badly-spaced, stained teeth were corrected or
disguised with artificial coverings.
The cosmetic chemist and beautician contributed to the
improvement in general standards of appearance by producing
make-up of a soft and more subtle consistency. Delicately
coloured rouges replaced the cruder dyes of Edwardian England
and two popular tints were described in a contemporary beauty
book as ‘Brunette’ and ‘Framboise’. Finer blends of powder
from natural materials were manufactured for the mass market,
but in only three basic shades—pink, natural and ‘Rachel’.
Endless research was devoted to that most popular cosmetic,
the lipstick; new colouring ingredients included carmine dye
made from insects found in the Canary Islands and Mexico;
Spanish alkanet root, and red lithol salts. The colour was mixed
into an oil base of spermaceti, beeswax and lanolin made of fat
extracted from the wool of sheep.
The production of better quality cosmetics continued to be
the main aim of toiletry manufacturers in the 1930s. By this
time the beauty business had become a thriving industry. In
1935 the value of cosmetics produced in England reached the
unprecedented figure of £6,769,000 and it was estimated that
thirty-five per cent of sales from chemist shops were toiletry
preparations. The office girl of 1932 spent what was, in the
values of the time, a large part of her weekly salary on cosmetics:
7d on face powder and manicure preparations, 4d on vanishing
cream, and 3d each on toilet soap, cleansing lotion, night cream
and lipstick (which in 1932 cost 2s and Is 3d for a refill). Apart
from in chemist shops, a comprehensive range of toiletry
could be bought in most department stores, and Woolworths
had begun to stock a selection of beauty preparations just
after World War I.
The ever-growing demand for novel ideas in toiletry en-
couraged cosmetic manufacturers to introduce an increasing
number of new beauty products to the mass market. Elizabeth
Arden produced her ‘colour harmony’ range, an interesting
innovation which involved matching make-up to clothes rather
than skin tones. In addition, she introduced a more extensive
variety of lipstick shades which were later matched up with
cream rouges designed to complement the range of lip dyes.
The number of tinted face powders on the market also increased.
Roger and Gallet produced perfumed powders in shades of
white, natural, ‘Rachel’, ‘Rachel Foncee’, ‘Ocre Rose’ and
‘Aurore’, and even the English chemists, Boots, had extended
their modest range of powder to include new colours. Innoxa’s
comprehensive selection of skin creams included ‘Complexion
Milk’, ‘Complexion Vitalizer’, ‘Skin Tonic’ and ‘Skin Food’.
In 1936 Yardley opened a beauty salon in Bond Street, adding
a new variety of toiletry products to their already famous
collection of soaps and colognes. 1937 saw the foundation of
the cosmetic house of Gala, which at first produced only three
lipstick shades, but later captured the younger woman’s market
by concentrating on the creation of new lip-colours with such
dramatic names as ‘Lantern Red’, ‘Blaze’ and ‘Sea Coral’.
Perfumes at this time were still only considered chic if they
were imported from France, but these were far too expensive
for the ordinary shop girl or office worker. However, in 1936 a
man named Douglas Collins provided a solution to the working
girl’s dilemma. His idea was to manufacture high quality
perfumes but reduce their retail price by selling them in small
bottles. He began his business at his mother’s home in Brighton,
marketing his products under the brand name of Goya. Later
he obtained four rooms in Whitehorse Street, Piccadilly, but by
1946 the sales of his perfumes warranted the purchase of a
factory housed in an eighteenth-century brewery at Amersham
in Buckinghamshire. The most famous Goya scents were ‘Black
Rose’ and ‘Passport’.
The healthy competition between cosmetic houses and
toiletry manufacturers, who were intent on capturing the
attention of the mass market, resulted in an enormous increase
in advertising. In the second half of 1932 approximately
£250,000 was spent on promoting beauty preparations. The
largest portion of this expenditure was concentrated on toilet
soaps, followed by skin creams, dentifrices, perfumery, face
powders and manicure products. Cosmetic houses began to
realise that, although advertising was a successful method of
encouraging sales of their preparations, attractively designed
containers and packaging were equally important. American
toiletry manufacturers were ahead of their English equivalents
in this respect and had employed the talents of designers like
Maurice Levy, who had introduced the first metal containers
for cosmetics. However, British beauty firms quickly followed
the example of the Americans and made use of the creative
skills of artists like Lalique to design their bottles, jars and
boxes.
The new large range of attractively packaged cosmetic
products must have presented the contemporary woman with a
bewildering variety of choice, but magazines and beauty books
were quick to provide their readers with hints on which kind of
preparation to use for their individual needs or what style of
make-up was best suited to their particular type of face. Vogue
Beauty Book of 1933 suggested that eyeshadows should match
the colour of the eyes although violet or silver tints could be
used to provide a touch of glamour for the evening. Blue
mascara was considered to be the most flattering, but blue-
green was thought to look more natural. False eye lashes,
which were now on the market, could be used by the really
daring woman, although those of a less adventurous nature
might prefer to curl their natural lashes with the aid of ‘a little
eyelash iron’. Vogue’s advice to its readers concentrated on the
importance of a youthful figure, which could be acquired with
the help of electrical massage now available at many beauty
salons, and articles entitled ‘The Skin Game’ insisted that ‘no
beauty can be a beauty today without a good skin’.
A pale complexion had become fashionable once more.
Magazines insisted that the bright pink cheeks of the pre-war
era were totally out of date. The new ideal in feminine looks
was vaguely reminiscent of the Middle Ages and depended on
good facial bone structure, thinly arched brows and a pure
white skin. Vogue stated that ‘some of to-day’s beauties haven’t
any more natural colour in their faces than a handkerchief’ and
although a light blush of rouge could be used in moderation,
lipstick provided the main colour emphasis to the face.
Contemporary men may well have approved of this new type
of pale femininity. Thus, in Noel Coward’s Private Lives, when
Amanda informs Victor that she intends to acquire a Riviera
sun tan, he is immediately unenthusiastic:

Victor: ‘I hate sunburnt women.’

Amanda: ‘Why?’
Victor: ‘It’s somehow, well, unsuitable.’
Amanda: ‘It’s awfully suitable to me, darling.’

However, unfortunately for Amanda, sunburnt complexions

were not to become fashionable till a later date as a healthy
suntan would have been at a variance with the whole look of the
 1930s, which was one of cool, urbane sophistication, more
adult than the twenties and dependent on elegant, immaculate
grooming.
The cinema began to have a positive influence on feminine
looks and one film star in particular possessed a type of beauty
which was so carefully copied that, to a large extent, it created
the style of appearance typical of the thirties. Greta Garbo’s
pale enigmatical features and her highly individual approach to
make-up were admired by female audiences all over England
{Plate 37). Cecil Beaton states that ‘Before Garbo, faces were
pink and white. But her very simple and sparing use of cosmetics
completely altered the face of the fashionable woman’. (The
Glass of Fashion.) One innovation which Garbo introduced was
the accentuation of the upper eyelid with a line of black eye-
brow pencil and many women began to use this cosmetic effect
in lieu of tinted eye shadow.
Other film stars like Norma Shearer, Jean Harlow and
Madeleine Carroll also had an influence on contemporary ideals
of beauty. Thus there began to be a demand for toilet prepara-
tions which enabled the girl in the street to emulate the
glamorous appearance of a Hollywood star. Cosmetic tooth-
pastes, which emphasised the whiteness of the teeth by tinting
the gums pink, appeared on the market, so that any woman
could now charm her husband or boy friend with one of those
dazzling smiles she had observed on the screen. But a flash of
white teeth was not enough, in her view, to create the perfect
image. She coveted the brightly-coloured gleaming lipsticks
which her favourite stars used in their film roles. These were
provided for the Englishwoman’s use by Hollywood cosmeti-
cian, Max Factor, who opened his first beauty salon in London
in 1936. Using his vast experience of film make-up as a guide,
he introduced a large variety of lipstick and powder shades to
the mass market. Lipsticks with a shiny finish became all the
rage and many other toiletry manufacturers, like the French
 firm of Lancome, produced successful versions of this type of
cosmetic.
The film world popularised yet another cosmetic innovation
—nail varnish. The vogue for painting fingernails had origi-
nated in Paris society and amongst the French elite who haunted
Riviera resorts in the summer, but it only came to the notice
of the general female public when film stars began to adopt the
fashion. The idea was immediately popular and, although some
women restricted themselves to the use of pale pink polish, the
more adventurous used brighter colours. ‘Cardinal’, ‘Garnet’
and ‘Coral’ were favourite shades of varnish, but some
American women were audacious enough to paint their finger‫־‬
nails black. In England, the deep vivid shades of red only
became generally accepted in 1936, and by 1938 toenails were
also being painted to draw attention to the open‫־‬toed evening
sandals which were then fashionable. At this date the colour
range of varnishes increased to seven shades, but Vogue was
insistent that ‘the blood shades are brilliant and decorative in
the evening but a little too, too violent for the light of day’.
Magazines, advertisements and films promoted an image of
beauty which made women increasingly aware of their looks
and any shortcomings they might have in comparison. As a
result they spent more time in beauty salons and hairdressers
to ensure that they were perfectly groomed. At home, their
dressing tables were covered in pots and jars, scents in cut-glass
spray bottles and face powder in ornate glass bowls. Eyebrow
pencils, mascara brushes, lipsticks and eyeshadows shared space
with containers of depilatory wax and cream or liquid
deodorants.
Women’s self-conscious attitude to beauty made them aware
of the appearance of their masculine escorts and articles on
‘Improving Your Husband’ were popular reading at the time.
The Englishman might well have appeared immaculate in his
own eyes: tastefully dressed in his London club or in manly
 Fig 30 Powder bowl press-
moulded in pale green glass
and acid etched to achieve a
frosted effect, with lid in the
form of a bathing girl sitting
on two shells, c 1930

tweeds on the golf course, with sensibly cut, short hair. His
wife, however, was determined to improve his standard of
grooming and was encouraged in this by magazines which
suggested he should use Continental perfumes instead of his
lightly scented after-shave lotions. They also insisted that a
husband secretly made use of his wife’s face powder, so why
should he not be provided with the 6after-shave powder’ which
was now on the market. There was also an 6after-shave cream’
which his wife could persuade him to use by insisting that it was
 an excellent way of soothing a chapped skin after a windy day
on the golf course. The Englishman, however, defeated both
his wife and the magazine journalists by maintaining a spartan
attitude to his toilette.
The Englishwoman’s delight in vanity suffered a severe blow
with the outbreak of war in 1939. Cosmetic houses in America
continued to supply their female customers with beauty prepa-
rations to boost morale during the war, but the English girl
often had to rely on a stiff and unpainted upper lip as cosmetics
became increasingly hard to obtain. The ‘Limitations of Sup-
plies Order’ of 1940 cut down cosmetic materials to a minimum
because the petroleum and alcohol necessary for the manu-
facture of toiletry was required for war purposes. Thus fewer
beauty preparations could be manufactured and the factories’
change-over to war work further restricted their production.
Yardley’s factory was used for manufacturing aircraft com-
ponents and sea water purifiers, whilst Cyclax employed their
expertise to invent a special sunproof cream which was supplied
to the War Office for soldiers fighting in hot climates. They also
provided a cosmetic paint which was mixed with green stain
and used by the army as a camouflage dye. This same cosmetic
paint formed the basis for ‘Cyclax Stockingless Cream’, a
preparation designed to replace the sheer stockings that were
now rationed. Englishwomen coloured their legs with the dye,
after which a ‘seam’ was drawn down the back of each ‘stocking’
with a black eyebrow pencil—a service no doubt performed by
a helpful girlfriend to ensure that the line was straight.
The extraordinary adaptability of the English in a time of
crisis was admirably illustrated by the list of cosmetic substi-
tutes supplied to girls in His Majesty’s Forces. It was appre-
ciated that make-up was essential to feminine morale, and
although generally frowned on in the women’s services,
cosmetics could be worn ‘with discretion’. A bizarre selection
of skin cleansers and colouring agents were suggested in lieu
of conventional beauty preparations. Lemon juice, methylated
spirit, potato flesh, the water from fruit parings, egg-white
were encouraged for toning the complexion and egg-yolk as a
shampoo, while vegetable oil was recommended as a foundation
for face powder. Even women who were not in the forces had
to improvise with home-made cosmetics, as lipsticks were often
only obtainable on the black market and such necessary
articles as toilet soaps were rationed.
38 Rita Hayworth. Hollywood glamour of the 1940s featured brightly coloured gleaming
lips and long varnished nails, which were copied by women everywhere.
39 Audrey Hepburn. Her whimsical, gamin type of beauty set the fashion in the late 1950s.
She emphasised her eyes with an exaggerated use of black eyeliner and accentuated her eye-
brows with dark pencil. To focus attention on her eyes, she used a very pale lipstick.
 CHAPTER TEN

The Twentieth Century

1945-1970S

Today’s very latest name of the game in eye make-up. From

Elizabeth Arden. The most spectacular spread of mood-matching
colours you’ve ever gazed on. Twenty-four tantalizing shades. All the
way from pretty cool to out-and-out wild. And such textures . . .
clear and creamy for Powder cream Shadows. Shimmer and sparkle,
the Powder frosts. The Ultra frosts, all dazzle and zing. Your own eye
make-up extravaganza. To dabble in. To do your own eye-thing
with. Beautifully. (Advertising copy for Elizabeth Arden’s ‘Self
Portrait Eyes’ 1972)

After the war and with the end of rationing, the commercial
world of fashion and beauty created a new image of femininity
for contemporary women. The military uniforms of girls in the
forces and the utility dress of wartime England had camou-
flaged the softer aspects of a feminine appearance. With the
possible exception of hairstyles like the romantic ‘page boy’
bob inspired by film star Veronica Lake, women had looked
like poor copies of their masculine counterparts. The unavail-
ability of toiletry and cosmetics had contributed to this spartan
image. Thus, when wartime restrictions ended, women longed
for the return of essentially feminine fashions in dress and
cosmetics.
Responding to this demand, Paris couturier Christian Dior
introduced his ‘New Look’ in 1947. It was in every way the
 antithesis of wartime utility dress. The shoulder line was
softer, waists were nipped in, and skirts were long and volu-
minous involving a lavish use of fabric which would have been
impossible during the war. Beauty houses correspondingly
produced a wide range of ‘New Look’ cosmetics to complement
this fashion and the variety of toiletry products now available
was greater than before the war.
A study of cosmetic advertisements in 1948 and 1949 gives
some indication of the diversity of beauty preparations manu-
factured at this time. The main emphasis was on colour and
novelty packaging. Elizabeth Arden produced a large variety
of matching lipstick and nail polish colours. Rimmel intro-
duced an ingenious palette of lip colour which incorporated a
mirror and brush. Goya, venturing into the field of cosmetics,
produced their ‘Thick and Thin’ lipstick. This consisted of two
metal lipstick containers, one slim and one thick, joined
together by a delicate chain. The narrow lip-pencil was used to
outline the Ups while the other filled them in with a generous
application of colour. Gala introduced a lipstick innovation to
the mass market in their ‘lipline’ pencil. The container for this
product, like the Goya lipstick, was its main selling feature. It
was designed to enable women to apply their Up colour with a
new degree of control and in the words of an enthusiastic
journalist: ‘The very newest lipstick is not a lipstick, but a real
lip pencil—long and slender, and sheathed in a bright gold
case. No more smudges as long as you can keep a fairly steady
hand. And you should get a clearer, better line, because it
really is easier to use.’ (Glasgow Citizen, 1948). The ‘lipline’
pencil was manufactured in Gala’s new range of colours,
which included the old favourites ‘Blaze’ and ‘Lantern Red’,
with matching nail polishes in ‘non-spill’ bottles.
The majority of beauty advertisements at this time con-
centrated on lipsticks or nail varnishes. These were obviously
the most popular cosmetics as they were essential to the new
 style of appearance. The fashionable ideal of femininity in the
late 1940s was one of brittle elegance and superficial glamour—
an image of beauty borrowed from the film world. Max Factor
was using film stars for his advertisements and top French
models were also employed to promote cosmetics. Their
scarlet lips and long, gleaming nails were considered chic and
even feminine (Plate 38).
The new appearance to which women aspired was in part
due to the influence of films but owed a great deal to the
emancipated role of women in society. Ever since World War
I, the old-fashioned idea of femininity had gradually changed.
In the thirties women had begun to see themselves as cool
sophisticates influenced by the detached, enigmatic approach
to life of film stars like Greta Garbo. By 1940 more women had
substituted office for home giving them the detachment of
financial independence. The film star image had exerted an
even greater influence on their imagination. Thus woman’s
ideal had altered from the submissive role of the Victorian
housewife to the role of a glamorous, worldly seductress.
The whole image of ‘glamour’, which largely depended on a
superficial and artificially produced type of beauty, created an
unprecedented demand for toilet preparations. It is undoubtedly
true, for instance, that the blonde goddesses of the screen,
who introduced the idea of sex appeal to the public, inspired
women to buy a much greater quantity of peroxide bleaches.
Women had become more capricious in their tastes and were
no longer content to devote their loyalty to one type of make-up
or skin cream. So beauty houses began to market an ever-
changing variety of cosmetics. During the war Englishwomen
had 6made do’ with a limited number of toiletry products. Now
they demanded not only variety but good quality and effective
results from their skin creams and lotions. They quickly dis-
covered that certain beauty houses produced particularly
suitable preparations for English complexions. Thus, Elizabeth
Arden, Yardley and Ponds enjoyed an especially good repu-
tation at this time. Styles of make-up also began to change more
rapidly than they had in the past. As a result the popular ideal
in feminine looks was modified with each new type of cosmetic
fashion. There was no longer a standardised image of beauty
which lasted for any length of time.
Although new lipstick and eyeshadow colours constantly
appeared in the shops, powder was still basically designed to
create a pink and white complexion. However, in the late
1950s Gala produced a new shade of powder and foundation
which was based on yellow and pink colouring ingredients.
The result was a beige face make-up which Gala cleverly
christened 6Mutation Mink’. The name was designed to evoke
thoughts of a Rolls-Royce and diamond tiaras—a snob appeal
that immediately captured the imagination of the mass market.
This, make-up was best suited to darker skinned women, but
it toned down the pinkest 6English rose’ complexion to the
deeper shades of a Continental skin. Other cosmetic houses
were producing a selection of dark or more subtly tinted
powders and foundations, and these created a new diversity
of artificial complexion colours.
One reason for this innovation in powder shades was the
realisation that each individual type of complexion was attrac-
tive in its own right. A pink or white make-up might suit the
true 6English rose’ colouring, but it only camouflaged the often
distinctive beauty of a dark or even sallow skin. The new
variety of powders and foundations enabled each woman to
enhance her own special kind of looks.
There was another more interesting reason for this new make-
up—the contemporary fashion for a darker complexion. For
centuries a white skin had remained a desirable feature of
beauty. Judging from the poetry, drama and prose of the past
it was considered the most important physical attribute that
any woman could possess. A brown skin was a characteristic
 of the country peasant who had to work in the fields for a
living. Therefore a suntan was a sign of humble social origins
whereas a carefully tended pale complexion was an indication
of a leisured aristocratic life. However, by the twentieth
century, society had changed and it had also became fashion-
able to travel abroad to coastal resorts in the summer. People
began to enjoy a new pastime—sunbathing. A bronzed com-
plexion was now considered attractive not only for its own
sake but because it indicated that the individual had just spent
an expensive holiday on the Continent—an advantage which,
before the days of the package tour, was not available to
‘Everyman’. Thus, a suntanned skin was considered chic—an
enviable characteristic of the Riviera elite. Sun oils and creams
became increasingly popular. These were designed to protect
the skin from over-exposure to the sun’s rays and allowed
women to tan their skins safely without burning themselves to
the colour of a well-boiled lobster. It is amusing to reflect that
in French or Italian peasant communities, even today, women
still believe in the long out-moded idea that a white skin
betokens gentle birth and is more beautiful than a skin which
has been exposed to the sun. Unlike the modern tourist who
makes strenuous efforts to acquire a bronzed tan, the French
peasant woman, whenever possible, shades her complexion
from the sun.
During the 1950s, the range of face powders and foundations
was matched by an equal variety of lipstick, eyeshadow and
nail varnish colours. The dark, vivid red lip-colourings of the
1940s were replaced by paler tints, which may well have been
designed to enhance the beauty of a summer suntan by con-
trasting with the darker tone of the skin. Also, if used in con-
junction with one of the deeper shaded or beige face powders,
they could simulate a summer complexion even during the
winter months. A popular selection of pale colours was pro-
duced by Gala who, following the example of Continental
 cosmeticians, added titanium to their lipsticks to give them a
white gleaming appearance on application. ‘Italian Pink’ was
a great favourite from this range. They also manufactured a
large number of middle tone colours and one of these was
their best-selling lipstick ‘Sari Peach’. When it came on the
market in the fifties, a joint promotion was organised with
Vogue who, in one issue of the magazine, selected the colours
of clothes to co-ordinate with this new lipstick shade—a type
of promotional idea subsequently repeated on many other
occasions. Paler lipsticks were also produced by other cosmetic
houses. A comprehensive range was available at low prices
from Woolworths, while Orlane, Dior and Lancome catered
for more expensive tastes.
Softer coloured lip shades made the mouth a less noticeable
feature of the face than during the days of scarlet lipstick.
Therefore more attention was focused on the eyes. The enormous
range of eyeshadow colours now available were sold in cream
or compressed powder form and some were even designed like
a child’s paintbox to be applied with water and brush.
Others resembled coloured crayons contained in metal holders.
Glitter eye shadows, whose sparkling effect was made by
adding fish scales to the colouring ingredients, were extremely
popular.
The most important change in eye make-up was effected by
the exaggerated use of black line to emphasise the upper lid
of the eye. The old-fashioned eyebrow pencil had been super-
seded by an innovation aptly described as ‘eye liner’. This was
a liquid form of cosmetic paint which was contained in a small
bottle and was applied with a brush. It was neater and in many
ways easier to use than eyebrow pencil. Women became really
adventurous with this make-up, employing it to accentuate the
lid and elongate the corners of the eye, which as a result
became the most made-up and dominant feature of the con-
temporary face. The studied application of this make-up bore
more resemblance to the eye decoration of ancient Egypt than
anything in English cosmetic history.
This extreme cosmetic fashion had, once again, been due to
the influence of a film star. Audrey Hepburn’s whimsical and
gamine type of beauty captivated film audiences of the day.
Her cropped ‘urchin’ hair-cut drew attention to her delicate
features and to her large dark eyes, which were outlined in
black paint so that they resembled those of an exotic gazelle,
while her natural brows were accentuated with dark pencil
{Plate 39).
Audrey Hepburn initiated the fashion for a style of appear-
ance which owed more to the Parisian left bank than to the
American Hollywood image of feminine glamour. English
girls were particularly attracted by the Continental type of
beauty seen in European films and attempted to acquire this
‘international’ look through their own use of cosmetics. In
the early 1960s heavy black eye make-up combined with the
use of, in many cases, white lipstick, contrived to turn the
English girl into a ‘pale and interesting’ French existentialist
student. A bizarre touch was added by contemporary nail
varnish colours, especially designed for the young market,
which ranged from yellow, green, blue and lilac to jet black.
Youth was to have a much greater influence on cosmetic
fashions during the sixties. The advent of ‘rock ’n’ roll’ from
America led to a new kind of popular music created for and
by the young. The teenage population made it an essential
part of their youth cult and in time a whole new style of dress,
hairstyles and cosmetics was designed for youthful tastes. The
most significant change in appearance was in the length of
men’s hair. The ‘short back and sides’ was replaced by a more
luxuriant growth of locks. The older generation was at first
appalled by these, as they believed, effeminate fashions. It is
to be noted, however, that throughout the entire history of
English fashion there were basically only two periods when
 men had short hair—the Middle Ages and the twentieth
century. In both cases this was a result of military campaigns.
The crusader knight had his hair cut to suit the climate of the
Holy Land, and during the two World Wars Englishmen were
subjected to army regulation hair cuts which continued to be
fashionable in peace time. Perhaps this reversion to what
historically has been a normal feature of the Englishman’s
appearance is a more accurate explanation for men’s wish to
grow their hair long than, as some sociologists would have it,
the preponderance of young males over females—so prompting
the need to attract feminine attention—or the revolt of one
generation against the conventions of its parents. At the same
time, an increase of interest in men’s toiletry and the greater
care devoted to appearance once more reverted to an older
tradition.
The need to capture the attention of the frequently capri-
cious young market constantly taxed the ingenuity of toiletry
manufacturers during the sixties. Apart from the teenage
demand for make-up, the busy young career girl also required
a range of cosmetics which were quick and easy to use. Beauty
houses began to concentrate on products which were neatly
packaged, expedient to apply and small enough to carry in a
handbag for use during the day. Helena Rubinstein’s 6mascara-
matic’, which dispensed with the old-fashioned block mascara
applied by brush and water, was immediately popular. It was
about the size of a fountain pen. A semi liquid mixture of
mascara and preservatives was contained in one end of the
6pen’. The other end held a narrow applicator resembling a
slim wand intertwined with a coil of metal. The mascara fixed
to the wand and was then applied to the lashes. The 6mascara-
matic’ was the forerunner of many other types of brushless
mascaras, although modern versions contradict this description
by substituting a narrow circular brush for the metal appli-
cator. 6Instant’ face make-up was much in demand and, although
the all-in-one powder and foundation, contained in a simple
compact, had been designed at an earlier date, it was parti-
cularly favoured at this time.
Cosmetics which created an instant effect and dispensed with
old-established beauty routines became increasingly popular.
Wearing false nails allowed women to escape from the con-
ventional manicure which had required patience and attention.
The application of false eyelashes provided a convenient if
artificial alternative to the laborious process of curling natural
lashes with old-fashioned devices. New types of home beauty
preparations enabled women to avoid, if they wished, spending
time in a professional salon. These products, unlike the 4home-
made’ cosmetics of the past, were mass-produced in factories
but designed to be used at home. A wide selection of face
mask treatments were now available made from simple natural
ingredients like lemon, oatmeal and lanolin. The perfected
design of contemporary hair dyes, semi-permanent colours and
tinting shampoos, produced by Focus, Inecto and Elida, made
it possible for women to colour their own hair yet achieve a
professional result. Shampoos were created and classified as
suitable for normal, oily or dry hair. Hair lacquer, conditioning
creams and medicated treatments were produced so that women
could keep their hair in a manageable state without having
to depend entirely on the services of a hairdressing salon.
Few women could dispense with the skills of a professional
hairdresser when it came to cutting the hair. English salons
had benefited from learning Continental cutting and styling
techniques and were now able to add innovations of their
own. Fashions in hairstyles changed rapidly during the 1960s.
Women discovered that fashion had outstripped them and
their hair was short when it needed to be long. False postiches,
wigs and half-wigs were used to simulate the right length of
hair and these could be quickly rejected should short cropped
locks return to popularity. The almost unanimous response by
 women to the caprices of fashion produced a degree of uni-
formity in hairstyles in the 1960s. Perhaps this was because
all women wished to have the same fashionable style when it
became the vogue. Or perhaps hairdressers imposed their
latest coiffure on too many women at the same time. Whatever
the reason, the London streets were filled with women, their
skilfully-cut hair cropped into elaborate topiary-like shapes,
who looked very similar in appearance.
A desire to conform to an accepted ideal of beauty also
encouraged many contemporary women to have their faces
altered with cosmetic surgery. A turned up nose could now be
straightened, protruding ears flattened and skin skilfully lifted
to erase any hint of wrinkling. In short, a modern plastic
surgeon could disguise age or rebuild a face to suit the mood
of the individual.
Cosmetic manufacturers added their expertise to the
specialised talents of the cosmetic surgeon and produced face
lotions, moisturisers, nourishing creams and stimulants that
catered for every age group or skin type. Their composition,
based on the results of painstaking chemical research, con-
tained every possible kind of natural and synthetic ingredient.
A hormone cream manufactured by Organon Laboratories
had come on the market and sold under the brand name of
‘Endocil’. This was considered to be especially suitable for
older women, whose natural hormone activity is on the decline.
The varied price range of complexion creams enabled women
of every income group to afford a good skin preparation.
Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden and Lancome catered for
the higher income brackets; Yardley for the middle income
group, and Boots for the moderately-salaried office girl.
The unprecedented variety of cosmetic preparations on the
market resulted in an extraordinary diversity of beauty adver-
tisements. Selling their products was an understandable
obsession with beauty houses. Advertising agencies, market
research experts and public relations consultants were employed
to help in the promotion of new cosmetic ideas {Plate 40).
Attractive packaging in aerosol containers, plastic tubes or
neatly designed cosmetic jars was an essential part of any
promotional campaign. Clever advertising copy and exciting
visual presentation could make all the difference between the

Fig 31 (left to right) Coty’s lip brush, Elizabeth Arden’s lipstick,

Yardley’s lipstick, and Gala’s ‘lip pen’, a 1970s’ version of the
earlier Gala Tipline’
 success or failure of a product. However, one of the most
important selling features of a toiletry commodity is its indi-
vidual product name. This can conjure up an image or create
an association of ideas in the minds of the buying public. An
evocative name can enhance a scent with the quality of either
romance or nostalgia and endow the most commonplace
cosmetic with an aura of mystique borrowed from some
historical period associated with a legend of beauty. Snob
appeal, sexual adventure and oriental mystery can be evoked
by the imaginative choice of one word or a simple title, whose
inherent promise of social success or Eastern enchantment is
the most effective method of selling the product.
Perfumes frequently have the most evocative names. ‘Je
Reviens’ hints at the nostalgia of a lover’s reunion; ‘L’Air du
Temps’ at the sylvan beauty of a summer wood, and ‘L’Aimant’
the promise of romance. ‘Bal a Versailles’ recalls the splendour
of the French court and ‘Le Coq d’Or’ is yet another reminder,
by Guerlain, of the exotic Eastern ballet introduced by
Diaghilev. Scents with the simplest names very often have the
most snob appeal, but this depends on the originator of the
perfume. Thus, Chanel could afford to label her famous scent,
‘No. 5’, while the plain initial ‘Y’ refers to a scent created by
Paris couturier, Yves St Laurent. In men’s toiletry the same
rule applies; ‘Arden for Men’ or ‘A Gentleman’s Cologne’
seem spartan in their simplicity, but the image they create is
instantly expensive and exclusive. Masculine animal virility is
implied by names like ‘Brut’ or ‘Cougar’, whilst ‘Old Spice’
has a more comfortable, homely image. Women’s lipsticks
manufactured for the expensive market are often distinguished
by numbers or a simple shade reference, whereas cheaper lip-
sticks have names which are a great deal more ‘expensive’
than the selling price.
In the early 1970s the names of complexion creams and
make-up indicate a preference for clinical simplicity. A hint of
 Fig 32 Bottles of nail varnish (left) Boots Number
17 (right) from Mary Quant

medically-analysed ingredients, vitamin-packed goodness or

herbal purity is much more likely to guarantee sales than any
hint of Eastern promise. In fact, the romantic names given to
cosmetics in the past would be totally unacceptable to the
modern market. A direct hard selling approach which unites
sexual success with beauty has proved popular, but many manu-
facturers have discovered that emphasis on the ‘medicinal’
aspect produces an even greater response in women. Skin
treatments with names like 6Natural Organic Skin Care’
(Ultima 11); 6Skin Life Biological Anti-Wrinkle Treatment’
(Helena Rubinstein), and 6Swedish Formula Hypo-Allergenic
Treatment Collection’ (Max Factor) might sound like cosmeti-
cians’ tongue-twisters but are apparently memorised by the
beauty-conscious modern woman. Allergy-tested cosmetics,
like the Almay and Clinique range, though specially designed
for women with skin allergy problems, are used more generally.
Make-up is named with a contrived plainness, a deliberate
attempt, in a feminist age, to shed its ultra-feminine glamour
image of the early twentieth century. 6Starkers’, a face make-up
by Mary Quant; 6Blush-on’, a rouge by Revlon, and a host of
preparations simply described as 6glosses’, 6shiners’ or 6blushers’
have replaced those earlier exotically titled cosmetics.
The modern face has benefited from the example of film

Fig 33 Modern make-up palettes (left) Revlon’s ‘Blush on’ rouge, (right)
Elizabeth Arden’s ‘Self-Portrait Eyes’
 and television make-up techniques. These ideas have been trans-
lated into the everyday application of cosmetics. Manufac-
turers have produced a whole series of make-ups and cosmetic
tools which enable a woman to bring out the individual
character of her face. Eyeshadows, rouges and face prepara-
tions, compactly packaged in neat palettes and boxes, come
in a variety of colours and textures, and a wide selection of
ingeniously designed brushes are provided for use with these
make-ups. Beauty writers are constantly advising women on
how to emphasise bone structure with artificial shadowing or
how to bring out the shape and colour of their eyes by means
of light or dark, shiny or matt eyeshadows. The subtle con-
sistency of modern make-up and the wide range of unusual
colour combinations allow modern women to employ these
‘face-shaping’ techniques with artful originality.
It is interesting to appreciate how the modern cosmetic
manufacturer, now part of a massive and complex industry,
copes with a high volume of output yet maintains a consistent
standard of product quality. Sophisticated and efficient factory
machinery has helped to produce the required volume of
cosmetic preparations, but chemical research, attention to
hygiene, and specialised skills are needed to maintain a uniform
level of quality.
Yardley’s, at Basildon in Essex, is a good example of a
modern cosmetic factory. Specialised machines produce two
hundredweight of face powder or half a ton of compressed
powder and foundation at a time. Vast metal blenders,
resembling giant food mixers, can in one mixing vat stir up
enough basic colouring substance to manufacture 40,000 lip-
sticks, and 20,000 individual lipsticks are produced daily. In
spite of the enormous volume of production, each quantity of
powder, face cream or lipstick is painstakingly examined for
bacterial contamination and to ensure that the colour or
texture is up to standard. A top dermatologist is often
consulted on the composition of new cosmetic compounds to
make sure that these are unlikely to cause any skin allergies.
Fresh consignments of lipstick, whose shades are already on
the market, are colour matched with the prototypes, manu-
factured to an exact standardised formula and produced by a
meticulous process. The coloured molten wax is poured into
a series of tiny moulds contained in a metal casing. These
‘embryo’ lipsticks are then subjected to a rigorous system of
temperature tests. They emerge from their moulds as a finished
product except for the process of ‘flaming’. This involves
sending the lipsticks down a narrow conveyor belt to roll
through tiny flames at a great speed. Thus, an outer coat of
the wax mixture melts and then dries again to a gleaming
finish. Each lipstick has now acquired a shining, polished

Fig 34 Mary Quant’s ‘Special Recipe’ foundation cream in a glass jar with
bright yellow plastic lid
42 Jean Shrimpton photographed at the window of her country cottage. A classic example
of the modern natural ideal of beauty.
 Although the manufacturing methods employed in a modern
cosmetic factory would have astounded an ancient Egyptian or
Elizabethan, many of the ingredients used in modern beauty
products would have appeared familiar to them. Talc and rice
powder still form the basis of face powders. Natural waxes, oils
and fats are employed as binding agents in the manufacture
of all-in-one face make-ups and eyeshadows, and as the main

Fig 35 White plastic bottle for Mary Quant’s

6Jelly Babies’ skin colour
 THE ARTIFICIAL FACE

compounds in lipstick and complexion creams. Colouring

ingredients are manufactured from basic earth pigments, iron
oxides, charcoals and various ochres. The familiar red ochre,
which has been used from the beginnings of civilised antiquity
as a cosmetic colouring, is still employed for the same purpose
today. However, synthetic materials are also used in modern
cosmetics. The ‘pearlised’ lipstick is no longer manufactured
from fish scales, but from an artificially produced silver sub-
stance whose glinting microscopic facets reflect the light and
give the lips a shining effect.
It is interesting that, in a scientific age, natural cosmetic
ingredients have not been completely replaced by synthetic
substitutes. In part, this is due to the undoubted efficiency of
natural materials which thus require no replacement. But, as
in the past, even make-up is affected by the influences of con-
temporary ideals and fashions. The modern fetish for health
food and the desire to preserve the natural environment from
technological change have turned ‘synthetic’ into a derogatory
word. The ‘natural’ cosmetic made from herbs and vegetable

Fig 36 Black plastic container for Yardley’s ‘Lipid’

moisturiser cream
substances, and scented with the natural perfume of thyme,
rosemary and marjoram or pine woods and fruit, is more
acceptable to modern tastes. Beauty preparations contained in
jars which would be more at home in a country larder; cosmetic
names, like ‘Jelly Babies’ by Mary Quant, which are nostalgic
reminders of a country sweet shop, and creams like Yardley’s
natural ‘Lipids’, designed to reproduce the skin’s own
moisturising process, are the distinctive products of make-up
manufactured in the early 1970s.
Thus modern cosmetics often purport to create a ‘natural’
look, employing bronze jellies to give an instant healthy,
tanned appearance to the skin; eyeshadows and lipsticks
which owe their inspiration to the colours of cottage garden
flowers and wild berries; and rouges and face make-ups which
emulate the glow of a windswept complexion {Plates 41, 42).
But these clever simulations of natural beauty are far removed
from the appearance of a truly ‘natural’ face, which would be
totally devoid of cosmetics. Human vanity, stimulated by the
dictates of fashion, perennially ensures that even when ideals
of beauty turn to nature for inspiration, her true aspect is
masked by the artificial face.
 Bibliography

GENERAL SOURCES

Ellis, Aytoun. The Essence of Beauty (1960)

Garland, Madge. The Changing Face of Beauty (1957)
Gombrich, E. H. J. The Story of Art (1966)
Laver, James. Costume (1963)
----- Dandies (1968)
----- Modesty in Dress (1969)
Piper, David T. The English Face (1957)
Poucher, William A. Perfumes, Cosmetics and Soaps (1959)
Williams, Neville James. Powder and Paint (1957)
Woodforde, John. The Strange Story of False Hair (1971)
Wright, Lawrence. Clean and Decent (1957)
Yarwood, Doreen. Outline of English Costume (1970)

CHAPTER ONE THE ORIGINS OF COSMETICS

Bradley, Carolyn. A History of World Costume (1964)

Elkin, A. P. The Australian Aborigines (Angus & Robertson,
Sydney, 1966)
Faris, James C. Nuba Personal Art (1972)
Hiler, Hilaire. From Nudity to Raiment (1929)
Josephy, A. M. The American Heritage Book of Indians (1968)
Strathern, Andrew and Marilyn. Self-Decoration in Mount
Hagen (1971)

CHAPTER TWO COSMETICS IN ANTIQUITY:

THE MIDDLE EAST

Herodotus. Trans. A. D. Godley (1920)

Levey, Martin. Chemistry and Chemical Technology in Ancient
Mesopotamia (Elsevier Publishing Company, USA 1959)
Lindsay, Jack. Cleopatra (1970)
Lucas, A. Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries (1962)
Noblecourt, Christiane Desroches. Tutankhamun (1972)
Pound, Ezra and Stock, Noel. Love Poems of Ancient Egypt
(1962)
Saggs, H. W. F. Everyday Life in Babylonia and Assyria (1965)

CHAPTER THREE COSMETICS IN ANTIQUITY:

GREECE AND ROME

Carcopino, Jerome. Daily Life in Ancient Rome (1956)

Cowell, F. R. Everyday Life in Ancient Rome (1966)
Homer. The Iliad, trans into prose by C. W. Bateman and
R. Mongan (1860)
Ovid. Ars Amatoria trans J. L. May (1959)
Pliny. Epistles trans William Melmoth (1925)
Theophrastus. Enquiry into Plants trans Sir Arthur Hort
(1926)
Willetts, R. F. Everyday Life in Ancient Crete (1969)

CHAPTER FOUR EARLY BRITAIN AND THE MIDDLE AGES

Brooke, Iris. English Costume of the Early Middle Ages (1936)

----- English Costume of the Late Middle Ages (1936)
Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales
----- The Romaunt of the Rose
Chronicles of the Crusades. Recorded by Richard of Devizes;
Geoffrey de Vinsauf and Lord John de Joinville; Henry G.
Bohn (1848)
Cockayne, Rev Oswald. Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft
(1866)
Coulton, G. G. The Medieval Scene (Cambridge University
Press 1930)
----- Life in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press
1928)
Davie, Adam King Alisaunder (A thirteenth-century Romance)
Harrison, Michael. The History of the Hat (1960)
The Book of the Knight ofLa Tour Landry trans from the original
French in the reign of Henry VI and edited from the unique
manuscript in the British Museum by Thomas Wright (Early
English Text Society 1868)
Manners and Household Expenses of England in the thirteenth
and fifteenth centuries including Manorial Rolls of Eleanor,
Countess of Leicester; Expenses of Sir John Howard (1462-9)
Roxburghe Club Collection, British Museum
Myers, A. R. England in the Late Middle Ages (1952)
Norton, Thomas. The Ordinall of Alchemy (fifteenth century)
Paston. Letters
Rosenberg, Melrich V. Eleanor of Aquitaine (1937)
Russell, John. The Boke of Nurture (Roxburghe Club Collection,
British Museum. 1460)
Scrope, Stephen. The Boke of Knyghthode (Roxburghe Club
Collection, British Museum, 1368 trans from the French by
Stephen Scrope in the fifteenth century)
Trevelyan, G. M. Illustrated English Social History (1944)
William of Malmesbury. The History of the Kings of England
and of His Own Times, trans Rev John Sharpe (1854)

CHAPTER FIVE THE LATE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH

CENTURIES

Castiglione, Count Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier, trans

Sir Thomas Hoby (1561)
Cunnington, Cecil Willett. Handbook of English Costume in
the Sixteenth Century (1962)
Dee, Dr John. Diary (sixteenth century)
Della Casa. Galateo trans R. S. Pine-Coffin (1958)
Jenkins, Elizabeth. Elizabeth the Great (1958)
Ben Jonson. Plays
Neale, Sir John Ernest. Queen Elizabeth 1st (1967)
Pater, Walter. The Renaissance (1961)
Platt, Sir Hugh. Delightes For Ladies (1602)
Shakespeare. Plays and Sonnets
Sidney, Sir Philip. Poems
Vaughn, William. Naturall and Artificial Directions for Health
(1600)
Wilson, Violet A. Queen Elizabeth's Maids of Honour and
Ladies of the Privy Chamber (1922)
----- Society Women in Shakespeare's Time (1924)
Wright, Thomas. Queen Elizabeth and her Times'. A series of
contemporary Letters (1938)

CHAPTER SIX THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Ashley, Maurice. Life in Stuart England (1964)

Crawford, G. M. Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth
(1887)
Cunnington, Cecil Willett. Handbook of English Costume in the
Seventeenth Century (1963)
Davidson, Lillias Cambell. Catherine of Braganza (1908)
Dowell, Stephen. A History of Taxation and Taxes in England
(1884)
Etherege, Sir George. The Man of Mode (1684)
Evelyn, John. Diary (1818)
Norman, Charles. Rake Rochester (1955)
Pepys, Samuel. Diary (Dent ed 1924)
Savile, Sir George, Marquis of Halifax. The Lady's New Year
Gift or Advice to a Daughter (1696)
Taylor, Jeremy. Several Letters Between Two Ladies (1701)
The Lady's Dressing Room Unlock'd and The Fop's Dictionary
(1700)
Thomson, Gladys Scott. Life in a Noble Household (1937)
Verney, Frances Parthenope. Memoirs of the Verney Family
(1892)

CHAPTER SEVEN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Bleackley, H. W. The Story of a Beautiful Duchess (1907)

----- The Beautiful Duchess (1927)
Cunnington, Cecil Willett. Handbook of English Costume in the
Eighteenth Century (1964)
Halsband, Robert. The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
(Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1956)
----- The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
(Oxford University Press, 1965)
Laver, James. English Costume of the Eighteenth Century (1931)
Pope, Alexander. Poems
Steele, Sir Richard. The Tatler (Everyman Library, 1968)
Thomas, E. Wynne. The House of Yardley (1953)
Walpole, Horace. Selected Letters (1967)

CHAPTER EIGHT THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Angeloglou, Maggie. A History of Make-Up (1970)

Anon. The Art of Beauty (1825)
Anon. The Art of Beauty: A Book for Women and Girls (1899)
Beerbohm, Max. In Defence of Cosmetics (1922)
Cooley, A. J. The Toilet and Cosmetic Arts (1866)
Dickens, Charles. Novels
Dudley, Ernest. The Gilded Lily (1958)
Elliott, Blanche B. A History of English Advertising (1962)
Franzero, Carlo Maria. The Life and Times of Beau Brummell
(1958)
Piesse, G. W. Septimus. The Art of Perfumery (1855)
4Peter Pindar’. Complete Works (1816)
Priestley, J. B. The Prince of Pleasure (1969)
Rachel, Madame. Beautiful For Ever (1363); 4The Extraordinary
Life and Times of Madame Rachel’ (Times, September 1868)
Richardson, Joanne. Sarah Bernhardt (1959)
Terry, Ellen. The Story of My Life (1908)
Tisdall, E. E. P. Queen Victoria's Private Life (1961)
Toilet Table Talk (1856)
Watson, Vera. A Queen at Home (1952)
Wilde, Oscar. Plays

CHAPTER NINE THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (1899-1945)

Beaton, Cecil. The Book of Beauty (1930)
----- The Glass of Fashion (1954)
Coward, Noel. Private Lives (1930)
Garland, Madge. The Indecisive Decade (1968)
Joyce, Max Wykes. Cosmetics and Adornment (1961)
Strauss, Rita. The Beauty Book (1924)
Vogue Book of Beauty (1933)

CHAPTER TEN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (1945-1970s)

Harper's Bazaar Folio of Fashion and Beauty (1949)
Vogue Beauty Book (1948)
Vogue's New Beauty Book (1958-9)

PERIODICALS

Harper's Bazaar (twentieth century)

The Gentleman's Magazine (eighteenth century)
The Ladies' Magazine (eighteenth century)
The Ladies' Journal (nineteenth century)
The Ladies' Pocket Journal (nineteenth century)
The Tatler (eighteenth century)
Vogue (twentieth century)

EXHIBITIONS

6Chaucer’s London’ (London Museum, 1972)

6The Masque of Beauty’ (National Portrait Gallery, 1972)
6Vanity Through the Ages’ (Brighton Museum and Art Gallery,
1972)
 A cknowledgemen ts

I should like to express my sincere gratitude to all those who

have helped me in writing this book. Help has been freely
forthcoming from a number of sources, but I am particularly
indebted to the following museums, organisations and indi-
viduals for their kind co-operation:
The Brighton Museum and Art Galley: particularly Mrs
Betty O’Looney, exhibitions organiser for the museum’s exhi-
bition of ‘Vanity through the Ages’, for supplying me with so
much valuable information on the individual exhibits. The
British Museum: especially the staff of the print room for
helping me with my picture research. The Victoria and Albert
Museum. The British Theatre Museum. The National Gallery.
The National Portrait Galley: my thanks are due to the publi-
cations department for their interest and help in suggesting
suitable paintings to illustrate this book. The Bodleian Library.
Conde Nast Publications Ltd. Gerald Duckworth Ltd: I am
grateful for their co-operation and should also like to thank
two of their authors, Professor James C. Faris and Dr Andrew
Strathern for allowing me to reproduce photographs from their
books, Nuba Personal Art and Self-Decoration in Mount Hagen.
Yardley and Co Ltd: the staff of their factory at Basildon,
Essex, were kind enough to escort me round the factory and
patiently answered all my questions. Yardley’s London office
supplied me with much valuable historical information about
the company and the history of cosmetic compounds. Elizabeth
Arden Ltd: they too helped in providing me with information
on the company and allowed me to reproduce one of their
early advertisements in this book. Barbara Attenborough
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Associates. Boots and Co Ltd. Cyclax Ltd. Gala of London

Ltd. John R. Freeman and Co Ltd: their team of museum
photographers supplied me with many excellent photographs
of historical material from the British Museum, The Victoria
and Albert Museum and the British Theatre Museum. Miss
Diana Hibling: my sincere thanks to her for patiently typing
the text of the book from my manuscript. I should also like
to thank my brother, Ronnie, for being kind enough to compile
the index, and my husband, Anthony, for all his helpful advice
and sustained interest in this project.
F.G.
 Index
Alexander the Great, 40 Deslys, Gaby, 143-4
Alexandra, Queen, 142 Diaghilev, 144, 172
Almay, 174 Dickens, Charles, 131
Ankhenaten, 27, 31 Dior, Christian, 161
Aphrodite, 41 Dior (cosmetics), 166
Arden, Elizabeth, 151-2, 153, 161,162, Disraeli, Benjamin, 136
164, 170, 172 Dudley, Sir Robert, Earl of Leicester,
86
Bakst, Leon, 144
Balsamo, Giuseppe, see Cagliostro, Eleanor of Aquitaine, 59, 60
Count Alessandro Elida, 169
Banville, Theodore de, 139 Elizabeth I, 71, 72-4, 75-6, 77, 79, 82,
Beaton, Cecil, 142, 156, 83, 84-5, 87, 100
Bedford, Earl of, 95, 96, 104, 106, 107 Endocil, 170
Beerbohm, Max, 140 Etherege, Sir George, 101, 107
Bendo, Dr Alexander, see Rochester, Evelyn, John, 99, 104
Earl of
Bernhardt, Sarah, 139 Factor, Max, 156, 163, 174
Bickerstaff, Isaac, see Steele, Sir Farina, John Maria, 133
Richard Focus, 169
Boleyn, Anne, 71
Boots, 153, 170
Brummell, Beau, 126-7 Gainsborough, Thomas, 109-10
Gala, 153, 162, 164, 165-6
Cagliostro, Count Alessandro, 119-20 Galen, 33
Caligula, 48 Garbo, Greta, 156, 163
Canute, King, 56 Gibbs, 133
Caracalla, 48 Gladstone, William, 132
Carroll, Madeleine, 156 Goya, 154, 162
Castiglione, Count Baldassare 75, 85 Guerlain, 144, 172
Catherine of Braganza, 99, 104 Gunning, Elizabeth, Duchess of Hamil-
Chanel, 172 ton, 111-12
Charles I, 90, 91, 94 Gunning, Maria, Countess of Coven-
Charles II, 95, 96, 98, 99-100, 101 try, 111-12
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 65, 67, 69 Gwyn, Nell, 98
Churchill, Winston, 145-6
Cleopatra, 32-3 Hadrian, 47
Clinique, 174 Harlow, Jean, 156
Collins, Douglas, 154 Harold, King, 57
Cooke, Sir John, 95 Helen of Troy, 41
Coward, Noel, 155 Hemming, Mrs Frances, 138
Cromwell, Oliver, 92, 94 Henrietta Maria, Queen, 90, 104
Culpeper, Nicholas, 102 Henry VIII, 71, 72
Cyclax, 138, 151, 159 Hepburn, Audrey, 167
Herodotus, 31, 32, 36
Dee, Dr John, 85 Hetepheres, Queen, 33
Della Casa, Giovanni, 81, 82, 86 Hillyarde, Nicholas, 86
 INDEX

Hoby, Sir Thomas, 75, 85 Quant, Mary, 174, 179

Holbein, Hans, 71
Homer, 38 Ralegh, Sir Walter, 78
Hugh, King of the Franks, 57 Ray, Gabrielle, 143
Revlon, 174
Inecto, 169 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 109-10
Innoxa, 153 Richard I, 60
Rimmel, Eugene, 133-4
James I, 89-90 Rimmel (cosmetics), 162
Jezebel, 34 Rochester, Earl of (Dr Alexander
Jonson, Ben, 75, 81 Bendo), 101-2
Julius Caesar, 42, 47 Roger and Gallet, 153
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 124
Lake, Veronica, 161 Rowlands, 136
Lalique, 154 Rowlandson, Thomas, 110
Lancome, 157, 166, 170 Rubinstein, Helena, 151, 168, 170, 174
Langtry, Lily, 139 Rudolf, Crown Prince, 139
Lely, Sir Peter, 96 Russell, John, 63
Leverson, Sarah Rachel (Madame
Rachel), 137-8 St Laurent, Yves, 172
Levy, Maurice, 154 Savile, Sir George, Marquis of Hali-
Lyndhurst, Lord, 136 fax, 103-4
Scipio Africanus, 47
Malmesbury, Lord, 136 Scrope, Stephen, 68
Marcel, M., 146 Shakespeare, William, 78, 84, 86
Matilda, Queen, 58 Shearer, Norma, 156
Millais, Sir J. E., 136 Sidney, Sir Philip, 70, 87
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 113-14 Spenser, Edmund, 74
Murray, Lord William, 128 Steele, Sir Richard (Isaac Bickerstaff),
113
Nefertiti, 27 Sunlight (soap), 136
Nero, 47 Sussex, Lady, 92, 100
Nessler, Karl, 146
Norfolk, Duke of, 127 Taylor, Jeremy, 89, 92-3
Norton, Thomas, 66 Terry, Ellen, 139
Noy, William, 91 Theophrastus, 41-2
Tour Landry, Geoffrey de la, 67
Organon Laboratories, 170 Tutankhamun, 27, 33
Orlane, 166
Ovid, 43, 46 Ultima II (Charles Revson), 174
Palmerston, Lord, 136 Vanbrugh, Sir John, 96, 108
Pears (soap), 136 Vaughn, William, 79, 80, 81, 83
Pembroke, Countess of, 107 Verney s of Clay don, 94-5, 100
Pepys, Samuel, 96, 98 Verney, Sir Ralph, 92, 94-5
Piesse, Septimus, 134-6 Victoria, Queen, 131, 132
Pindar, Peter (pseudonym), 128
Pisan, Christine de, 68 Walpole, Sir Horace, 109, 111, 122,124
Pitt, William, 128 Wilde, Oscar, 139, 140
Platt, Sir Hugh, 72, 77, 82 William of Malmesbury, 57, 58, 59
Pliny, 42, 48, 102 William of Normandy, 57
Poiret, Paul, 144 Woolworths, 153, 166
Ponds, 164
Pope, Alexander, 121, 123 Yardley, 118, 134, 153, 159, 164, 170,
Prince Regent, 127 175, 179; Yardley and Statham, 132
THE ARTIFICIAL FACE THE ENGLISH CEREMONIAL
Fenja Gunn BOOK
Men and women have never been• satisfied A History of Robes, Insignia and
with their own natural appearance and their Ceremonies Stiil in Use in England
method^ of painting their faces and bodies Roger Milton
and dressing their hair have always reflected
social attitudes. This history of cosmetic An account of the College of Arms and of
fashions illustrates the varying ideals of the office and dress of heralds throughout the
beauty down the ages, and its detailed study centuries is followed by a chapter on royal
of the methods used by both sexes robes and regalia and a short history of
illuminates the changes in moral attitudes English Coronation ceremonies. Robes and
and social conditions, be they the result of insignia of peers of the realm are next
war, revolution or the opening up of the examined; there is an account of the evolu-
eastern world. tion of legal dress and, following a resume of
The origins of cosmetics in prehistoric the origins of knighthood, descriptions of the
ritual body and face painting are illustrated insignia and robes of British orders of
by examples from primitive societies and the chivalry. A ‫״‬final chapter deals with civic
beauty preparations of the ancient Middle robes and uniforms. The book is lavishly
East and Mediterranean civilisations are illustrated with sixty drawings in line and
described in detail. This was of course the colour.
background to the use of cosmetics in #7 x 5%in Illustrated
Europe on which the book concentrates.
Every aspect of ‘the artificial face’ is
described, including hairstyles, hair dyes, the
shaving habits of men and the development
of hygiene and the use of scent. THE WATER CLOSET
The author has drawn widely on con-
temporary sources and with the help of a A New History
rich selection of contemporary paintings and Roy Palmer
drawings of the ‘tools’ of make-up, she
reveals the often extraordinary machina- The history of the water closet is a social
tions adopted to achieve fashionable beauty. history in itself, with many curious aspects
She views it from every angle, often unflat- to it. It is also a story of ingenious experi-
teringly. This is a piece of carefully ments, many of them failures. Beginning
researched social history that is, at the vith. the ancient civilisations, Roy Palmer
same time, as entertaining as the pages of explains the development and variation of the
today’s glossiest fashion magazines, cover- WC, its place in society, and in literature, and
ing the times of Nefertiti and before, to describes the problems of the pioneer inven-
Jean Shrimpton and after. tors and manufacturers. There was an
aesthetic as well as a functional side to
building WCs which is fully illustrated, and
:he story ranges from individual extravagance
to public utility, told in a world context and
Jacket Illustration: ‘The Daughters of brought right up to date with the VWC.
Edward VII.’ Courtesy of the National x 5%in Illustrated
Portrait Galley.

£3.95 net
ISBN. 0 7153 6299 2 In UK only Printed in the UK