Elizabeth I loved lipstick. For a time it was so popular that you could use it as a cash substitute. And when she died, she had half an inch of the red stuff caked on her lips. But it wasn’t that she wanted to die looking good. She believed – as did many others during the Tudor and Elizabethan periods – that lipstick was magic.
Many people believed not only that lipstick was magic, but also that it could ward off death. And so, Elizabeth applied more and more lipstick whenever she was sick. The cochineal – expensive dye made from crushed dried beetles native to Mexico – was considered magical and healing, and it was that coloring that helped give lipstick its magic.
Elizabeth made her own bright red lipstick with a recipe of cochineal, gum Arabic, egg whites, and fig milk. Elizabeth also invented lipliner. She would mix together ground alabaster or plaster of Paris with the color – again, likely cochineal – and rolled the paste into a pencil shape. This then dried in the sun until it was hard.
Many of Elizabeth’s ladies followed her lead, and wore their own lip coloring. But there was a risk. Those magical powers? They attracted the attention of the church. Early Renaissance paintings sometimes even depicted the devil putting lipstick on women. One of the most frequent sins confessed by women to their priests was their use of lipstick.
A medieval text also said that using lipstick was a mortal sin unless it was done “to remedy severe disfigurement or so as to be not looked down upon by [one’s] husband.”
Eventually England’s Parliament passed a law outlawing the use of makeup to deceive a man into marrying a woman – breaking the law was considered witchcraft!
Listen to more about the Tudors and makeup, and Elizabeth I’s lipstick in this throwback Renaissance English History Podcast episode: Episode 065: Cosmetics and Makeup
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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 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.