In this episode I indulge my girly side and talk about makeup. Before there was spray on foundation for HD cameras there was lead white face paint. Before there was waterproof lipstick there was cochineal. I get kind of grossed out thinking about putting bug blood on my face, but then I read the ingredients in a lot of cosmetics today and I realize that bug blood ain’t so bad.
Face Paint: The Story of Makeup
Beauty and Cosmetics 1550-1950 (Shire Library)
History of Beauty
Jill Burke. 2011. ‘Making Up The Renaissance’ [14th October 2015] Available from: https://sites.eca.ed.ac.uk/renaissancecosmetics/
Recipes
Lead Face Powder: http://www.umich.edu/~ece/student_projects/leisure/leadfacepowder.html
Recipe for Ceruse (white foundation) :
‘Take calcium and burned tin, heat them together in a glassmaker’s furnace for three or four days, and mix the resulting ashes with green figs or distilled vinegar’
Recipe for Fucus (red facepaint) :
‘Mix cochineal with the white of hard-boiled eggs, the milk of green figs, plume alum and gum arabic’
-Milton Carroll ‘The Elizabethan Woman’
Elizabethan Cosmetic Recipes from http://fms406nevillenewelizabethans.blogspot.com.es/2015/10/tudor-cosmetics-and-dangers.html
To make the complexion white: ‘Take leaves and roots of nettle and boil them in water and with this water wash your hands and face and they will become white and soft.’
To reduce redness in the face: ‘Take white lead, rose water and violet oil and mix together and anoint the face.’
Powder to make teeth white: ‘Take coral and rock alum burned and ground very well and pass through a sieve and use’
To make hair and body hair grow: ‘Take borax water, fumitory water, water of plantain and with this water wash where you want and take a comb comb and comb very well.’
Links
National Portrait Gallery: http://www.npg.org.uk/assets/files/pdf/exploring-elizabeth/npg_tudor_makeup.pdf
Beauty Beacons YouTube on achieving Anne Boleyn’s look
Very Rough Transcript: Tudor Cosmetics and 16th century makeup
Hello, and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and being in touch with our own humanity. This is episode 65, a little shorter than usual since it’s the holidays, and we’re indulging my girly side by talking about cosmetics and make up in the 16th century. If anyone is still looking for a Christmas gift for me, I’ll totally take a Sephora gift card. Also, if you’re someone who really isn’t in to cosmetics or makeup, I think this episode will still be interesting to you for its historical value. Those of us who wear makeup might recognize some of the efforts that people went through in order to be beautiful five hundred years ago, and how little things have changed.
But before I get started, a few reminders. Firstly, please check out the Agora Podcast Network, of which this podcast is a proud member. The Agora podcast of the month is The History of Egypt Podcast. Find it on iTunes, or any podcasty places, as well as egyptianhistorypodcast.com.
Remember you can get show notes for each episode – this episode has recipes for Tudor beauty products, for example – along with the book recommendations, at Englandcast.com, where you can also sign up for the newsletter list and get extra minicasts, special book giveaways, and other fun stuff. Go to Englandcast.com to sign up.
I want to start off this episode with a quote that I think many women will understand when I read it.
From “Book of the Courtier” 1513-18 by Baldasarre Castiglione :
” Haven’t you noticed how much prettier a woman is if, when she makes up, she does so with so little that those who see her cannot tell whether she is made up or not? But others are so bedaubed that it looks like they are wearing a mask and dare not laugh because they fear it will crack. Such women never change colour except when they dress in the morning, and must spend the rest of the day like motionless wooden images…. How much nicer it is to see a woman, a good looking one I mean, who obviously has nothing on her face, neither white nor red, but just her natural colour, which may be pale or sometimes slightly tinged with a blush caused by embarrassment or the like, maybe with her hair tousled and whose gestures are simple and natural, without working at being beautiful?”
It’s the old catch 22 that women today still deal with. You’re supposed to just be beautiful without wearing makeup visible enough that it looks like you’re trying too hard.
As with most things we talk about in this podcast, the world of cosmetics and makeup changed dramatically in the 16th century. When we start off, we don’t see a lot of heavy face makeup. By the end of the period we see women like Elizabeth herself, caking their faces in white lead paint. The changes were in part thanks to trade and new products being available, but it was also down to the changing aesthetics and sense of what a beautiful woman looked like.
So let’s talk about what the ideal woman looked like. First, she had super pale skin. Poor women worked outside, and so they would have suntans. But if you were wealthy and showed that you didn’t have to work outside, you would have super pale skin. To make the white stand out even more, she would have red cheeks and lips. Men would also strive to have this white skin, and would put foundation on as well, so we have equal opportunity make up going on here. It’s interesting that when Anne Boleyn first attracted Henry’s attention, people thought to comment on her dark complexion and hair. The ideal woman had fair skin and hair, blue eyes, and rosy cheeks.
But let’s go back a bit first. Makeup has been used since people first saw their reflection in standing water. Think about Cleopatra with her dark eyes. Evidence of cosmetics goes back to 3000 BC. The Egyptians would use dark colors on their eyelashes, and eyebrows, and they used a form of henna to paint nails and color their hair. They also had a red ochre to use on their lips and cheeks. So this isn’t anything new.
But in the early Tudor period people didn’t really use that many cosmetics. The focus was on creams to make your skin soft, and they’d use honey, sesame seed oil, and beeswax, which really isn’t that different than what’s in my Burt’s Bees lotion now. People also focused on how they smelled. Perfumes were made from flowers like roses.
But under the reign of Elizabeth, fashion and makeup took on a new importance at court, and Elizabeth herself tried out many of these potions and lotions, in part because of her smallpox scars.
So let’s talk about this white skin, shall we? Like I said, pale skin was the ideal. And women would go to all sorts of extremes to achieve this look. Think about the pale skin in Elizabeth’s portraits. Pretty much white, right? There were a lot of ways you could get this look.
Some women would actually have themselves bled to appear paler. Yes ladies. You think putting on tinted foundation, face powder, mascara and lipgloss is work. Imagine being bled every day to get the desired shade of skin color you wanted.
Things could get worse, though. Some women would ‘swallow gravel, ashes, coals, dust, tallow candles, labour and toil themselves to spoil their stomach, only to get a pale-bleak colour’. Women who preferred not to use cosmetics to whiten their skin would wash in their own urine or wine.
For acne and spots, women would use a remedy made from lemon juice or rose water mixed with honey, eggshells, mercury and alum. They also washed their faces with mercury as a face mask and this would make their skin super soft.
The main way you would get the white face, though, was with a product called Ceruse. You made this by mixing white lead with vinegar, and because you were in fact smearing lead on your face it was very poisonous. Also, you might not wash it off every day, and in fact just keep applying more on top of it. So you’d have a nice healthy layer of lead on your face. Some people actually theorize that Elizabeth herself was killed thanks to lead poisoning from her makeup. But people would still go ahead and use it to try to hide smallpox scars, like Elizabeth did.
Something else that is rather bizarre is that women would often paint false veins on their skin in order to make it look more transluscent and youthful. So you would literally use a brush and paint veins on your forehead or cheeks.
Women didn’t wear a lot of eye makeup, but they would use kohl on their eye lashes to make a sort of mascara. Kolh began to be imported to England from the middle east during the crusades, and it was becoming very popular by this time. It was also important to have the eyes be the focus, and women would go a little bit extreme with plucking their eyebrows, and made really high arches.
You also wanted to have red cheeks, almost what we would consider clown-like now. Bright red circles on the cheeks. Women would use the dye from a cochineal, a bug, and the dye is in the bug’s body and eggs. You could also use dye from madder or vermillion.
So your face would be this white face, possibly with fake veins, likely washed in urine or wine, with all kinds of things like egg whites, and lead caked on. Attractvie, eh? Then you’d have clown circles painted on your cheeks, kohl mascara and overly plucked eyebrows. And bright red lips. Kind of reminds me of something you’d see in Camden Town in the 80’s.
The most popular hair colours were anything fair such as blonde and ginger. To dye their hair, the women would use urine or a mix of oil, cumin, seed, saffron and celandine. All of these ingredients were expensive so no one apart from the wealthy could afford them.
For women who wanted to dye their hair red (which was very popular during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I), henna was used as a hair dye. The yellow hair dye was made from a mixture of saffron, cumin seed, celandine and oil.
Some women wore wigs which was an alternate to hair dying. Queen Elizabeth is said to have had no less than 80 wigs before she died. The most popular hairstyle was a high hairline, to achieve this look many women would pluck the hairs on the top of their forehead so their hairline would go back roughly one inch. Elizabeth I always wore one of her red wigs, Her natural hair was already a red shade so she didn’t need to wear a wig for the colour, but she did have alopecia which made her lose her hair, so that’s likely why she did wear one all the time.
There are a couple of book recommendations this week, and I’ll have them all up on the website with links to purchase. One is Face Paint, the Story of Makeup by Lisa Eldridge. Remember you can get the show notes, and this transcript, as well as sign up for the newsletter all at the site, or by texting the listener support line at 801 6TEYSKO or tweeting me @teysko. That’s also the best way to get in touch, or also through the facebook page at facebook.com/englandcast. Remember also to sign up for the newsletter to get the digital advent calendar!
Thanks so much for listening everyone. The next episode is going to be a joint one I did with the gentlemen of the ReConsider podcast when they were here visiting me a few weeks ago, and we talk about how the principles of their political podcast can be applied to the study of history. Then I’m getting into War With France Mode with a few episodes on the French foreign policy during the 16th century, and how it changed, culimating in an episode devoted to the Field of Cloth of Gold in February.
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop.
She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 30 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history (how exciting when she got to interview Alison for the first time!). In addition to history, she is passionate about travel, and has lived in 3 countries and 4 states (not counting her perpetual state of confusion), and her family (who help her host her YouTube channel occasionally).
