An eighteenth-century European product, Arsenic Complexion Wafers, was actually eaten to achieve a white pallor. And it worked—by poisoning the blood so it transported fewer red hemoglobin cells, and less oxygen to organs.
A popular Greek and Roman depilatory, orpiment, used by men and women to remove unwanted body hair, was equally dangerous, its active ingredient being a compound of arsenic.
Rouge was hardly safer. With a base made from harmless vegetable substances such as mulberry and seaweed, it was colored with cinnabar, a poisonous red sulfide of mercury. For centuries, the same red cream served to paint the lips, where it was more easily ingested and insidiously poisonous. Once in the bloodstream, lead, arsenic, and mercury are particularly harmful to the fetus. There is no way to estimate how many miscarriages, stillbirths, and congenital deformities resulted from ancient beautifying practices—particularly since it was customary among early societies to abandon a deformed infant at birth.
Throughout the history of cosmetics there have also been numerous attempts to prohibit women from painting their faces—and not only for moral or religious reasons.
Xenophon, the fourth-century B.C. Greek historian, wrote in Good Husbandry about the cosmetic deception of a new bride: “When I found her painted, I pointed out that she was being as dishonest in attempting to deceive me about her looks as I should be were I to deceive her about my property.” The Greek theologian Clement of Alexandria championed a law in the second century to prevent women from tricking husbands into marriage by means of cosmetics, and as late as 1770, draconian legislation was introduced in the British Parliament (subsequently defeated) demanding: “That women of whatever age, rank, or profession, whether virgins, maids or widows, who shall seduce or betray into matrimony, by scents, paints, cosmetic washes, artificial teeth, false hair, shall incur the penalty of the law as against witchcraft, and that the marriage shall stand null and void.”
It should be pointed out that at this period in history, the craze for red rouge worn over white facial powder had reached unprecedented heights in England and France. “Women,” reported the British Gentlemen’s Magazine in 1792, with “their wooly white hair and fiery red faces,” resembled “skinned sheep.” The article (written by a man for a male readership) then reflected: “For the single ladies who follow this fashion there is some excuse. Husbands must be had…. But the frivolity is unbecoming the dignity of a married woman’s situation.” This period of makeup extravagance was followed by the sober years of the French Revolution and its aftermath.
By the late nineteenth century, rouge, facial powder, and lipstick—six-thousand-year-old makeup staples enjoyed by men and women—had almost disappeared in Europe. During this lull, a fashion magazine of the day observed: “The tinting of face and lips is considered admissible only for those upon the stage. Now and then a misguided woman tints her cheeks to replace the glow of health and youth. The artificiality of the effect is apparent to everyone and calls attention to that which the person most desires to conceal. It hardly seems likely that a time will ever come again in which rouge and lip paint will be employed.”
That was in 1880. Cosmetics used by stage actresses were homemade, as they had been for centuries. But toward the closing years of the century, a complete revival in the use of cosmetics occurred, spearheaded by the French.
The result was the birth of the modern cosmetics industry, characterized by the unprecedented phenomenon of store-bought, brand-name products: Guerlain, Coty, Roger & Gallet, Lanvin, Chanel, Dior, Rubinstein, Arden, Revlon, Lauder, and Avon. In addition—and more important—chemists had come to the aid of cosmetologists and women, to produce the first safe beautifying aids in history. The origins of brand names and chemically safe products are explored throughout this chapter.
Beauty Patch and Compact: 17th Century, Europe
Smallpox, a dreaded and disfiguring disease, ravaged Europe during the 1600s. Each epidemic killed thousands of people outright and left many more permanently scarred from the disease’s blisters, which could hideously obliterate facial features. Some degree of pockmarking marred the complexions of the majority of the European population.
Beauty patches, in the shapes of stars, crescent moons, and hearts—and worn as many as a dozen at a time—achieved immense popularity as a means of diverting attention from smallpox scars.
In black silk or velvet, the patches were carefully placed near the eyes, by the lips, on the cheeks, the forehead, the throat, and the breasts. They were worn by men as well as women. According to all accounts, the effect was indeed diverting, and in France the patch acquired the descriptive name mouche, meaning “fly.”
Patch boxes, containing emergency replacements, were carried to dinners and balls. The boxes were small and shallow, with a tiny mirror set in the lid, and they were the forerunner of the modern powder compact.
The wearing of beauty patches evolved into a silent, though well-communicated, language. A patch near a woman’s mouth signaled willing flirtatiousness; one on the right cheek meant she was married, one on the left, that she was betrothed; and one at the corner of the eye announced smoldering passion.
In 1796, the medical need for beauty patches ceased. An English country doctor, Edward Jenner, tested his theory of a vaccine against smallpox by inoculating an eight-year-old farm boy with cowpox, a mild form of the disease. The boy soon developed a slight rash, and when it faded, Jenner inoculated him with the more dangerous smallpox. The child displayed no symptoms. He had been immunized.
Jenner named his procedure “vaccination,” from the Latin for cowpox, vaccinia. As use of the vaccine quickly spread throughout Europe, obliterating the disease, beauty patches passed from practical camouflage to cosmetic affectation. In this latter form, they gave birth to the penciled-on beauty mark. And the jeweled patch boxes, now empty, were used to hold compacted powder.
Nail Polish: Pre-3000 B.C., China
The custom of staining fingernails, as well as fingers, with henna was common in Egypt by 3000 B.C. But actual fingernail paint is believed to have originated in China, where the color of a person’s nails indicated social rank.
The Chinese had by the third millennium B.C. combined gum arabic, egg white, gelatin, and beeswax to formulate varnishes, enamels, and lacquers. According to a fifteenth-century Ming manuscript, the royal colors for fingernails were for centuries black and red, although at an earlier time, during the Chou Dynasty of 600 B.C., gold and silver were the royal prerogative.
Among the Egyptians, too, nail color came to signify social order, with shades of red at the top. Queen Nefertiti, wife of the heretic king Ikhnaton, painted her fingernails and toenails ruby red, and Cleopatra favored a deep rust red. Women of lower rank were permitted only pale hues, and no woman dared to flaunt the color worn by the queen—or king, for Egyptian men, too, sported painted nails.
This was particularly true of high-ranking warriors. Egyptian, Babylonian, and early Roman military commanders spent hours before a battle having their hair lacquered and curled, and their nails painted the same shade as their lips.
Such ancient attention to fingernails and toenails suggests to cosmetics historians that manicuring was already an established art. The belief is supported by numerous artifacts. Excavations at the royal tombs at Ur in southern Babylonia yielded a manicure set containing numerous pieces in solid gold, the property of a doubtless well-groomed Babylonian nobleman who lived some four thousand years ago. Well-manicured nails became a symbol of culture and civilization, a means of distinguishing the laboring commoner from the idle aristocrat.
Creams, Oils, Moisturizers: 3000 B.C., Near East
It is not surprising that oils used to trap water in the skin and prevent desiccation developed in the hot, dry desert climate of the Near East. More than two thousand years before the development of soap, these moisturizers also served to clean the body of dirt, the way cold cream removes makeup.
The skin-softening oils were scented with frankincense, myrr
h, thyme, marjoram, and the essences of fruits and nuts, especially almonds in Egypt. Preserved Egyptian clay tablets from 3000 B.C. reveal special formulations for particular beauty problems. An Egyptian woman troubled by a blemished complexion treated her face with a mask of bullock’s bile, whipped ostrich eggs, olive oil, flour, sea salt, plant resin, and fresh milk. An individual concerned with the advancing dryness and wrinkles of age slept for six nights in a facial paste of milk, incense, wax, olive oil, gazelle or crocodile dung, and ground juniper leaves.
Little has really changed over the centuries. A glance at any of today’s women’s magazines reveals suggestions of cucumber slices for blemishes, moist tea bags for tired eyes, and beauty masks of honey, wheat germ oil, aloe squeezed from a windowsill plant, and comfrey from the herb garden.
In the ancient world, the genitalia of young animals were believed to offer the best chances to retard aging and restore sexual vigor. Foremost among such Near East concoctions was a body paste made of equal parts of calf phallus and vulva, dried and ground. The preparation—in its composition, its claims, and its emphasis on the potency of infant animal tissue—is no more bizarre than such modern youth treatments as fetal lamb cell injections. Our contemporary obsession with beauty and sexual vigor into old age, and the belief that these desiderata can be bottled, have roots as ancient as recorded history—and probably considerably older.
Of the many ancient cosmetic formulas, one, cold cream, has come down to us through the centuries with slight variation.
Cold Cream: 2nd Century, Rome
First, there is something cold about cold cream. Formulated with a large quantity of water, which evaporates when the mixture comes in contact with the warmth of the skin, the cream can produce a slight cooling sensation, hence its name.
Cold cream was first made by Galen, the renowned second-century Greek physician who practiced in Rome.
In A.D. 157, Galen was appointed chief physician to the school of gladiators in Pergamum, and he went on to treat the royal family of Rome. While he prepared medications to combat the serious infections and abscesses that afflicted gladiators, he also concocted beauty aids for patrician women. As recorded in his Medical Methods, the formula for cold cream called for one part white wax melted into three parts olive oil, in which “rose buds had been steeped and as much water as can be blended into the mass.” As a substitute for the skin-softening and-cleansing properties of cold cream, Galen recommended the oil from sheep’s wool, lanolin, known then as despyum. Although many earlier beauty aids contained toxic ingredients, cold cream, throughout its long history, remained one of the simplest and safest cosmetics.
In more recent times, three early commercial creams merit note for their purity, safety, and appeal to women at all levels of society.
In 1911, a German pharmacist in Hamburg, H. Beiersdorf, produced a variant of cold cream which was intended to both moisturize and nourish the skin. He named his product Nivea, and it quickly became a commercial success, supplanting a host of heavier beauty creams then used by women around the world. The product still sells in what is essentially its original formulation.
Jergens Lotion was the brainstorm of a former lumberjack. Twenty-eight-year-old Andrew Jergens, a Dutch immigrant to America, was searching for a way to invest money he had saved while in the lumber business. In 1880, he formed a partnership with a Cincinnati soapmaker, and their company began to manufacture a prestigious toilet soap. Jergens, from his years in the lumber trade, was aware of the benefits of hand lotion and formulated one bearing his own name. His timing couldn’t have been better, for women were just beginning to abandon homemade beauty aids for marketed preparations. The product broke through class barriers, turning up as readily on the vanity in a Victorian mansion as by the kitchen sink in a humbler home.
The third moderately priced, widely accepted cream, Noxzema, was formulated by a Maryland school principal turned pharmacist. After graduating from the University of Maryland’s pharmacy school in 1899, George Bunting opened a drugstore in Baltimore. Skin creams were a big seller then, and Bunting blended his own in a back room and sold it in small blue jars labeled “Dr. Bunting’s Sunburn Remedy.”
When female customers who never ventured into the sun without a parasol began raving about the cream, Bunting realized he had underestimated the benefits of his preparation. Seeking a catchier, more encompassing name, he drew up lists of words and phrases, in Latin and in English, but none impressed him. Then one day a male customer entered the store and remarked that the sunburn remedy had miraculously cured his eczema. From that chance remark, Dr. Bunting’s Sunburn Remedy became Noxzema, and a limited-use cold cream became the basis of a multimillion-dollar business.
Mirror: 3500 B.C., Mesopotamia
The still water of a clear pool was man’s first mirror. But with the advent of the Bronze Age, about 3500 B.C., polished metal became the favored material, and the Sumerians in Mesopotamia set bronze mirrors into plain handles of wood, ivory, or gold. Among the Egyptians, the handles were of elaborate design, sculpted in the shapes of animals, flowers, and birds. Judging from the numerous mirrors recovered in Egyptian tombs, a favorite handle had a human figure upholding a bronze reflecting surface.
Metal mirrors were also popular with the Israelites, who learned the craft in Egypt. When Moses wished to construct a laver, or ceremonial washbasin, for the tabernacle, he commanded the women of Israel to surrender their “looking-glasses,” and he shaped “the laver of brass, and the foot of it of brass.”
In 328 B.C., the Greeks established a school for mirror craftsmanship. A student learned the delicate art of sand polishing a metal without scratching its reflective surface. Greek mirrors came in two designs; disk and box.
A disk mirror was highly polished on the front, with the back engraved or decorated in relief. Many disk mirrors had a foot, enabling them to stand upright on a table.
A box mirror was formed from two disks that closed like a clamshell. One disk was the highly polished mirror; the other disk, unpolished, served as a protective cover.
The manufacturing of mirrors was a flourishing business among the Etruscans and the Romans. They polished every metal they could mine or import. Silver’s neutral color made it the preferred mirror metal, for it reflected facial makeup in its true hues. However, around 100 B.C., gold mirrors established a craze. Even head servants in wealthy households demanded personal gold mirrors, and historical records show that many servants were allotted a mirror as part of their wages.
Throughout the Middle Ages, men and women were content with the polished metal mirror that had served their ancestors. Not until the 1300s was there a revolution in this indispensable article of the vanity.
Glass Mirror. Glass had been molded and blown into bottles, cups, and jewelry since the start of the Christian era. But the first glass mirrors debuted in Venice in 1300, the work of Venetian gaffers, or glass blowers.
The gaffer’s craft was at an artistic pinnacle. Craftsmen sought new technological challenges, and glass mirrors taxed even Venetian technicians’ greatest skills. Unlike metal, glass could not be readily sand-polished to a smooth reflecting surface; each glass sheet had to be poured perfectly the first time. The technology to guarantee this was crude at first, and early glass mirrors, although cherished by those who could afford them and coveted by those who could not, cast blurred and distorted images.
A Roman vanity, centered around a hand-held mirror. Mirrors were of polished metals until the 1300s.
Image (and not that reflected in a mirror) was all-important in fourteenth-century Venice. Wealthy men and women took to ostentatiously wearing glass mirrors about the neck on gold chains as pendant jewelry. While the image in the glass might be disappointingly poor, the image of a mirror-wearer in the eyes of others was one of unmistakable affluence. Men carried swords with small glass mirrors set in the hilt. Royalty collected sets of glass mirrors framed in ivory, silver, and gold, which were displayed more than they were used.
Early mirrors had more flash than function, and given their poor reflective quality, they probably served best as bric-a-brac.
Mirror quality improved only moderately until 1687. That year, French gaffer Bernard Perrot patented a method for rolling out smooth, undistorted sheets of glass. Now not only perfectly reflective hand mirrors but also full-length looking glasses were produced. (See also “Glass Window,” page 156.)
Hair Styling: 1500 B.C., Assyria
In the ancient world, the Assyrians, inhabiting the area that is modern northern Iraq, were the first true hair stylists. Their skills at cutting, curling, layering, and dyeing hair were known throughout the Middle East as nonpareil. Their craft grew out of an obsession with hair.
The Assyrians cut hair in graduated tiers, so that the head of a fashionable courtier was as neatly geometric as an Egyptian pyramid, and somewhat similar in shape. Longer hair was elaborately arranged in cascading curls and ringlets, tumbling over the shoulders and onto the breasts.
Hair was oiled, perfumed, and tinted. Men cultivated a neatly clipped beard, beginning at the jaw and layered in ruffles down over the chest. Kings, warriors, and noblewomen had their abundant, flowing hair curled by slaves, using a fire-heated iron bar, the first curling iron.
The Assyrians developed hair styling to the exclusion of nearly every other cosmetic art. Law even dictated certain types of coiffures according to a person’s position and employment. And, as was the case in Egypt, high-ranking women, during official court business, donned stylized fake beards to assert that they could be as authoritative as men.
Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things Page 30