Cosmetic History

The word "cosmetic" is a derivative from the Greek kosmetikos, meaning a sense of harmony and order, or one skilled in adorning.

If you think your beauty ritual is complicated now, take a minute to look back at what ancient beauties had to endure.

Centuries old beauty recipes included red ochre, poppies, date pits, rose leaves, crocodile dung, and seaweed.

It started with Egypt's Queen Nefertiti who painted kohl on her eyes as liner. She crushed flowers to use as eye shadow. Ancient Roman women tinted their lashes with a quill dipped in a mixture of powdered lead and water. Centuries later, black incense was used and later, hot black wax. The Phoenicians emphasized their eyes with a black paste composed of gum Arabic, musk, ebony, and ground insects.

During colonial times, men enjoyed more freedom with products than women. They oiled, dyed and conditioned their hair, mustaches, and sideburns often with a touch-up dye for graying hair called Mascaro, from which the word mascara was derived.

During the reign of Elizabeth I, many women shaved off a portion of hairline and eyebrows to produce an illusion of large, wide open eyes.

To paint lips, as far back as 5000 BC, the Greeks used red sulfide of mercury, which was quite poisonous. Face powder was made from equally lethal arsenic. Other versions throughout history included ground white lead, almond paste, ground chalk, mercury and ground egg shells. White lead was known to have serious side effects such as headaches, dizziness, constipation and blindness. These powders also turned bluish after lengthy sun exposure. Many of them were often preserved with an egg white glaze. A lead based rouge may then have been added. In the Victorian era, lead was finally abandoned though unscrupulous powder purveyors cut their wares with caustic potash or prussic acid.

In the 17th century Orient, nails were colored by injecting organic dyes into the matrix under the cuticle. Through the 17th and much of the 18th centuries, hair and wigs were powdered white or silver, though occasionally pink, blue or lavender. Specially designed bellows puffed clouds of wheat flour, soft white earth or a mix of starch and plaster of paris onto liberally pomaded heads. The dusting craze ran into trouble when hungry French peasants rioted in 1715 against this frivolous use of wheat.

The mid-nineteenth century poet, Charles Baudelaire wrote in his "In Praise of Make-Up":

Fashion is a symptom of a craving for the ideal. That craving soars irresistibly to the top of our thoughts, leaving far below it the accumulation of the gross, the mundane and the despicable that are fundamental to everyday life. Fashion is a sublime deformation of nature.

Indeed