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    Beauty and Cosmetics 1550 to 1950
    Beauty and Cosmetics 1550 to 1950
    Beauty and Cosmetics 1550 to 1950
    Ebook143 pages1 hour

    Beauty and Cosmetics 1550 to 1950

    By Sarah Jane Downing

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    The source of tremendous power and the focus of incredible devotion, throughout history notions of beauty have been integral to social life and culture. Each age has had its own standards: a gleaming white brow during the Renaissance, the black eyebrows considered charming in the early eighteenth century, and the thin lips thought desirable by Victorians. Beauty has ensured good marriages, enabled social mobility and offered fame and notoriety, and has led women – and some men – to remarkable lengths in cultivating it, from the dangerous quantities of lead applied by Elizabeth I, to the women of the 1940s and '50s, who employed face powder, lipstick and mascara to look their best during the privations of war and austerity, creating a chic appearance to which many still aspire.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateJul 20, 2012
    ISBN9781782001195
    Beauty and Cosmetics 1550 to 1950
    Author

    Sarah Jane Downing

    Sarah Jane Downing is a freelance writer with a special interest in the eighteenth century. She has written widely about the arts, contributing to national and local magazines and newspapers.

    Read more from Sarah Jane Downing

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      Book preview

      Beauty and Cosmetics 1550 to 1950 - Sarah Jane Downing

      gratification.

      THE SIN OF VANITY

      EXHIBITING enormous power or inspiring incredible devotion, throughout history beauty has been women’s chief asset. For those naturally blessed, their beauty could ensure a good marriage, offer social mobility, fame or adventure. For those less fortunate life could be very cruel. Without such obvious gifts it was necessary to use cosmetics to invent them, and over the centuries women have applied themselves wholeheartedly to achieve the beautiful ideal, risking their lives using poisonous chemicals, their reputations and their fortunes at the risk of blackmail, and even the wrath of God.

      Pre-Christian pagan cultures had seen women as the embodiment of the goddess, their beauty a gift from Mother Earth to be enhanced and celebrated through ritual and adornment. Keen to break with a pagan past, the early Christians set themselves against the use of cosmetics and adornment as part of the repudiation of idolatry and even cleanliness, which was associated with the Roman worship of water spirits. Like the early Christian writer Tertullian, who damned women as ‘the doorway to the devil’, they looked upon women with suspicion, especially when it came to their beauty, which they should not draw attention to for fear of inciting lustfulness or falling into the sinful state of vanity. Instead of trying to improve their looks, Tertullian wrote in his De Cultu Feminarum that women should do no more than ‘to have their eyes painted with chastity, the Word of God inserted in their ears, Christ’s yoke tied to their hair, and subject themselves to their husbands.’

      Pride (woodcut, c. 1570). The perils of pride are graphically displayed: woman was thought to be ‘the doorway to the devil’, and needed to be perpetually vigilant against his advances, the first of which was to make her fall in love with her own reflection, and once she had committed the sin of vanity she was within his grasp!

      The ban on cosmetics was almost complete save for a few aromatic lotions and ointments based on Druidic herbal lore, but these were considered dangerously akin to witchcraft as the Druids endowed the plants with magical as well as healing properties. The hair was the only possible expression of beauty, and male courtiers at the court of King Canute were reported to have waist-length hair, which they groomed every day. Maybe because the men were so proud of their hair, the women became even prouder, emphasising their femininity by growing their hair extremely long to create fantastic braids that reached their knees and were as thick as a man’s wrist. This glorious cloak of femininity was never so adeptly utilised as when the Lady Godiva made the first naked protest clothed only in her hair in c. 1057.

      Lady Godiva (Edmund Blair Leighton, 1892). In the mid-eleventh century the hair was the only acceptable expression of beauty, but even that possibility was curtailed at the time of the Norman Conquest, concealed by the coifs and headdresses the Normans made fashionable.

      It was only with the introduction of the chivalric code, derived from the Saracen tradition of chivalry encountered during the Crusades, in c. 1140 that attitudes to women changed radically. English knights developed elaborate codes of conduct to demonstrate their finer feelings. Although the core belief remained about not touching women because they were inherently sinful, the knights delighted in writing songs and poetry for them, extolling their beauty.

      Ladies’ Toilette of the Fourteenth Century (illustration, c. 1795). Most ladies would have had few items more glamorous than a comb, tweezers and an ear picker within their beauty boxes.

      Just as their praise was ritualised, the notion of beauty was idealised and standardised to a ‘type’ and, to conform, women had to strip away their individuality rather than add to it. The dominance and expressiveness of the eyebrows was completely removed as they were plucked away to nothing leaving the face delicate, vulnerable and pious. The desire for a high, elegant forehead prompted ruthless tweezing to take the hairline up as far as the top of the head and away from the neck and borders of the face, creating the elongated oval ideal. The overall effect was heightened by a stiff white headdress next to a complexion as pale and dewy as a lily, with a hint of rose barely discernible in the cheek and lips.

      Cosmetics were available but opinion was against their use: in his translation of the Romaunt of the Rose Geoffrey Chaucer describes Beautee in great detail – her yellow hair, clear grey eyes, her lily-white brow, and little pink mouth – but he is also careful to note Beautee as ‘using no peynte’ and leaving her eyebrows to grow (although this may have been the preference of the author Guillaume de Lorris, who wrote the original poem in c. 1230). Chaucer offers a contradictory opinion in the 1380s, in Troilus and Cressida, when he writes of the heroine: ‘Fine-plucked were her two brows and like a bow / Bended they were, and black as any sloe.’

      Portrait of a Lady in Yellow (Alesso Baldovinetti, c. 1465). Although she still has slim eyebrows, her hairline has been plucked back to a point that would terrify most middle-aged men.

      Fourteenth-century ladies wanted to be beautiful as well as fashionable, and although cosmetics would extend

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