Urine was also another early “cleanser.” The sixteenth-century English surgeon Willian Bullein prescribed a mixture of “distilled water of honey, strong vinegar, milk, and the urine of a boy.” I wonder how that conversation would go—imagine asking your little brother why he had to pee in a jar.
Our trusted doc, Maister Alexis, again recommended to “take earth and knead it with dog’s pisse, and laie upon the warts and they will drie up and consume awaie.” Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: the early face mask. As Herman notes, this waste product is still used in modern products. Let’s look at a few of the ingredients that have stood the test of time and sanitation.
Modern Cosmetics
Questionable ingredients are not just in products from ages past, but can still be found in makeup currently on the market. And not just drugstore brands, but the fancy, expensive ones too. Don’t think rust could possibly be in your forty-dollar lipstick? Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Let’s look at lipstick, the one makeup product we unintentionally end up ingesting. The following list are ingredients still used in today’s makeup, and how they are abbreviated on the label so you can find them yourself.
Bugs
The insect “cochineal” has been used to color a variety of products since Cleopatra’s time. It’s used to give the red color in lipstick. The pigment comes from the crushed bodies of pregnant females. Fun fact: it takes about ninety thousand bugs to create just one kilogram of cochineal powder. Cochineal also appears in items like yogurt, fruit juice, nail polish, and blush. Labels to look for: carmine, carminic acid, and cochineal extract. Thousands of another insect, the “lac” bug, are killed for use in nail and hair products. Labels to look for: shellac.
Rust
How does red pigment get into lipstick? If not the above insects, we use rust, or sometimes both, in blush, lipstick, and other cosmetics. Labels to look for: iron oxide or any five-digit number starting with “774,” such as 77491.
Lead and Other Metals
Lead and co. are found in commodities like lipwear, toothpaste, eyeliner, sunscreen, eyedrops, and more. I found it interesting that it was so difficult for me to find out how we, consumers, can actually identify lead, and other harmful metals. There aren’t many resources, unless you dig, which leads me to the conclusion the cosmetic industry doesn’t want them to be easily identified. Sorry to spoil the grand scheme. Labels to look for: lead acetate, chromium (transition metal), thimerosal (mercury compound), calomel or mercurio (fancy names for mercury).
Animals and Their Parts
All that glitters is…fishy. Powdered fish scales are being used in products like eyeshadow, nail polish, and bath products to create a pearly, crystalline shimmer. Labels to look for: guanine and hypoxanthine. A man named Umesh Soni, a Mumbai-based microbiologist, founded the cosmetic company named Cowpathy whose sole mission is to create products using cow dung and “cowe pisse,” as Maister Alexis might refer to it, since it is believed to have healing properties. Labels to look for: anything Cowpathy.
Unclog Your Bust
Trying to title this section had my brain all…stopped up. I almost called it “The Boob Booster.” Had to get that off my chest. But I digress before I’ve even begun. Let’s start over.
Oh, men. Inventors of high heels, bras, and all that is uncomfortable for women. The very first patent with the clearly stated purpose of breast enhancement appeared in 1889. The patent application was submitted by a man named Harry L Miller, hailing from Chicago, Illinois. The purpose of the Bust Developer, he wrote, was “to fill out shrunken and underdeveloped tissues, form a rounded, plump, perfectly developed bust, producing a beautiful figure.”
The contraption itself is a “bell-shaped dome,” which in all honesty resembles a fancy toilet plunger. Just like them, it also has a straight handle extending up, and is used in the exact same manner. Except, the only thing you’re unclogging from your body is more boobage.
The users are instructed to place the dome around “the part to be treated” tightly, so no air escapes. Once they place their finger or thumb over the device’s opening, blocking all air, they pull on it, causing suction. In the end, “the result [is] that the supply of blood to the parts being treated is increased. The repetition of this treatment tends to an increased growth or an enlargement of the bust.” An ornamental way of saying, “Yeah, so whatever you do to the toilet, just do that on your chest!”
When advertised to the public in the Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog, it was given a more appealing name, The Princess Bust Developer, and was sold as a package deal with two other products. One was jar of Bust Cream or Food (the actual product name, I guess they’re indecisive like me), and a liquid concoction called Genuine Fleur De Lis Bust Expander was thrown in for free. The price? You could get all three for the unbeatable price of $1.46. In today’s money that’s about forty-one dollars.
Another breast enhancement invention was called Lady Bountiful’s Vacuum Pump. It had a different design, but was used for the same purpose as the plunger. A key difference? It was powered by water. Instead of a long handle, it had a flexible plastic tube a few feet long, and a cone shape that fit over the breast. The directions specified to use it in your bathroom, and in a few simple steps:
1.Attach vacuum unit [i.e. the long plastic tube] to the cold-water faucet.
2.Turn the water on—full force.
3.Place plastic cup snugly over breast.
4.Place thumb over the small opening near the cup, and hold the thumb there, until the vacuum (created by the flow of water) pulls the breast out fully into the cup.
5.After the breast has been pulled into the cup, release thumb suddenly, and allow breast to return to original position.
I would love to see how flooded the bathroom floor was after the first use.
The breast enhancement craze is a beauty standard that has not died out through the years. The methods have merely gotten craftier and more high tech, with surgical alteration being the permanent solution most popular now.
Before we end this section, I wanted to mention an exquisitely cringeworthy book written in the 1970s titled Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Mind Power: How to Use the Other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts. This book attempts to teach its readers how they can think their breasts bigger. With their mindpower alone. Thankfully, I was not able to find this book being sold anywhere on the market. Small blessings. But, if you happen to have a copy and this mindpower method works for you…let me know, won’t you?
Mouche Ado about Fashion
An etching of a young beauty-marked woman by
French artist Gilles Edme Petit.
Rarely do both men and women take up the same fashion trends, but the case of mouches is special.
It once was a popular practice for both men and women alike to decorate their faces with a black patch or, when on a woman, “beauty mark.” These were called mouches. In French, this word means “fly”—which makes sense, given the beauty marks were black and usually about the same size as one. Also common, however, was that the patches were also cut in a variety of shapes, from hearts, to crescent moons, and more.
This fashion can be traced back to the time of the Roman poet Ovid, but grew in popularity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in France and the UK, and again, later, during America’s early Hollywood era. It was mainly practiced by the upper class who could afford to accessorize. The mouches could be made from silk, velvet, satin, or taffeta—not cheap materials to acquire during its heyday. An option for people of limited income was made of mouse skin. There is even a street in Venice called Calle de Moschete, where these accessories were once sold.
Sources suggest many reasons this became so popular for both sexes. Yes, the patches were a fashion statement, but they were also used for more practical purposes to cover up smallpox scars, blemishes, or when you were simply having a bad fac
e day. The contrast and pow of the dark mark was believed to make you appear more attractive.
Samuel Pepys, a diarist in the mid-seventeenth century, who is known for the accurate descriptions of everyday life in his notebooks, once wrote about when his own wife began imitating this trend. “My wife seemed very pretty today,” he writes, “it being the first time I had given her leave to wear a black patch.” Not long after, when he was recovering from bout of illness, it looks like he invaded her boudoir. He wrote that he was, “Up pretty well again, but my mouth very scabby, my cold being going away, so that I was forced to wear a great black patch.” You see, even Mr. Pepy’s wanted to look purty.
As the popularity of patching grew, it also became a way to show social status—married women might wear the patch on their right cheek, available women on their left, and mistresses next to their mouths. Oftentimes, the placement of the mouche acted as a code for secret lovers. Entire books were written on this art, containing all the codes and meanings behind the placement.
The Patch Party
In another vein, patching became a method to display which political party you supported. This could be the party a woman’s husband supported, but often it was the lady’s preference. There you go…an important piece of fashion for women during a time when they did not get a say, nor the chance to voice their opinions. We women will always find a way.
The English essayist and playwright Joseph Addison wrote about this in the satirical newspaper he co-founded, The Spectator. His piece covers these “party patches,” as he calls them. One evening, when he attended the opera, he noticed groups of women sharing “hostile glances” with one another, and noticed that their faces were patched differently. Some had placed their mark on the left side of their forehead, others on the right.
The 1788 edition of Addison’s satirical newspaper.
“Upon inquiry,” he writes, “I found, that the body of Amazons on my right hand were Whigs, and those on my left, Tories. And that those who had placed themselves in the middle boxes were a neutral party, whose faces had not yet declared themselves.” Addison further adds a twist of humor in his article by describing a woman who had a natural birth mole on her forehead that caused much confusion among the ladies. “Rosalina, a famous Whig partisan, has most unfortunately a very beautiful mole on the Tory part of her forehead; which…has occasioned many mistakes, and given an handle to her enemies to misrepresent her face, as though it had revolted from the Whig interest.” I think I would have caused a great deal of confusion as well, since I am quite be-freckled.
There were many naysayers regarding the use of patches, of course. Clergy and other members of society believed the practice was vain, and that vanity was, of course, the root of evil. It was banned, and brought back many times over the years, it’s last renaissance came during the early days of the Hollywood film era. It’s been quite a while since beauty patching has buzzed our way, but who knows! Just like flies, fashion trends always have a way of coming back.
Malepolish
Trends have a boomerang-y nature. They usually always come back. At this writing, men wearing nail polish has become in vogue once more, but many think it is a new development. However, men have been wearing nail polish, or malepolish as I call it, since about 3,200 BCE.
In Babylonia, Rome, and China, warriors were known to paint their nails, lips, and hair black in preparation for battle. In China, they’ve been painting their nails for over five thousand years. But, it might be more accurate to say they “dyed” them since the concoction was more liquid than modern polishes we’re used to. It was usually made from a combo of egg whites, gelatin, and beeswax. More commonly, though, they use “kohl” which could be made from lead or charcoal.
Nail tinting was done mainly by the upper class and, depending on the color, to show social status. In other words: the darker your nails, the cooler you were. Kind of like today. Dark nails make you look badass. I think I know what color I’m choosing for my next manicure.
Headdress Over Heels
In the early 1400s, the width of one’s headwear was all the rage. The more shade you could get over your toes, the better. But later in the century, this transitioned to vertical, skyward growth in an alarming fashion trend. One fashionable example was the hennin.
The hennin was a headdress in the shape of a cone or unicorn horn, usually with a thin veil draping from the top. As the fashion grew in popularity, the height of the hennin would reach nearly four feet tall. Women had to use sturdy pins, ribbons, or even glue, some sources say, to keep it strapped onto their heads.
The headdress was worn at a slight tilt, about a forty-five-degree angle, covering all of a woman’s hair. And since the hennin rested so far back on the head, women would often pluck their hairline back, so that not a single strand showed. Having a very large forehead was trendy, so many would also pluck off their eyebrows too!
Hennin popularity started in Europe, and spread quickly to the English courts. As with most high fashion, these steeple headdresses were reserved solely for upper-class women. How could you weave or tend a field whilst wearing a precariously placed four-foot headdress?
As different styles of the hennin developed, you could find variations such as one that looked like a Turkish fez, or another called the butterfly hennin, where two cones or wires were used as the peaks, making you look like you had big bunny ears under your veil. Or like you had the Queen of Hearts’ oversized, heart-shaped head. It was simply high fashion.
Mine Is Bigger than Yours
As the headwear of the ladies grew taller, men were waging their own battle of “whose is bigger.” And no, I’m not referring to that. Dirty mind. Well, maybe I kind of am.
In the Middle Ages, around the 1360s, the male fashion trend for long, pointy shoes grew in England. In fact, it became popular just after the Black Death killed a large chunk of the population, so it’s probable that men wanted something a little lighthearted and frilly to brighten up their lives. Retail therapy, if you will. These pointy shoes became popularly known as poulaines, translating from French roughly to “shoes worn in the Polish fashion,” because that’s where they originated.
As the years went by (it stuck around for about three hundred years!), the tips of the shoes grew longer, and longer, making it almost impossible for men to walk. Some tips recorded reached as long as two feet! Starting from the tip of their real toes. If the average male foot is about nine inches, they were ambling around with nearly three feet. That’s a lot to carry around! You were basically walking around in leather skis.
Some extensions grew so heavy that they had to be
supported by chains strapped to the knees.
The poulaines were—like so much of fashion—a status symbol. The longer your tips were, the wealthier you were. Men could barely walk around in these shoes, which showed they were fancy enough that they didn’t need to do any physical labor.
As with most daring fashion, the church and government grew shocked at the sexual significance of these shoes, and laws we’re put in place to regulate them. You see, many men would stuff their shoe tips with wool, whalebones, or other materials in order to keep them—ach em—erect. Some would even paint their shoe extensions a fleshy, skin-toned color. Yes, the Middle Agers were sexier than we thought.
This gravity-defying footwear made a soft reappearance in the 1950s with the winklepicker shoes—though this style is much more subdued. But it made a large and in charge comeback recently, in the early 2000s, in Matehuala, Mexico. Men added flare to their cowboy boots in the same traditional fashion. But some of these shoe styles—if one can truly call them shoes—reach several feet long. The extensions usually curve upward in the same way you might imagine elf shoes to look. Some high fashion designers even started featuring them on their runways. But, as with any trend, it’s only a matter of time before it fades. After all…what goes up must come down. Wink.
Four-Legged Panty Hose
It looks like a pair of tights made specially for the aliens Kang and Kodos Johnson from The Simpsons, but inventor Annette Pappas had a different species in mind. The Panty Hose x3 is a four-legged panty hose product meant to provide ladies with an extra leg wherever they go.
You would wear them normally (one leg in each hole), and tuck in the extra two. That way, in the case of a rip or little snag, you could just nip away to the bathroom and rotate another leg on. Simple! Now, if only I could get Kang and Kodos out of my head.
Suck It in, Dude
It will make all women quite gleeful to know that there was a moment—a very quick, white hot moment—in history where men got a little taste of what we women had to go through for fashion. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, having a thin waist was very in vogue, not just for women, but for men as well! The high fashion of the time for men included very form-fitting trousers and jackets. But, what about those who needed a little help sucking it in? A little figure shaping? Well, around 1820, men began wearing corsets for the very first time in history. I’ll let that sink in for a moment, guys.
Reast’s Invicorator Belt being modeled.
One particular corset brand for men, Reast’s Patent Invicorator Belt, expounded on the many manly benefits it would bring: “Besides showing off the figure and enabling the tailor to ensure an effective fit and distinguished appearance, this combined Belt Corset is a necessity to most men for the promotion of health and comfort, together with an upright, soldierly bearing.”
Corsets are notorious for the damage they can cause to one’s internal organs, but that’s apparently not the case here. “It expands the chest. It supports the spine, and holds the figure erect. It protects the lungs and kidneys from cold. It support the stomach.” The advertisement then goes on to demonstrate a (probably fictional) conversation between two doctors trying on the corset. (Excuse me, belt.)
We Did That? Page 13