How Early Did Women Use Makeup

Makeup cosmetics such as eyeshadows, lipstick, mascara and makeup accessories on white, wooden background, top view — ©photka/Shutterstock.com

Hither'due south a question for makeup users and nonusers akin: Would y'all believe that philosophers once determined makeup trends?

What about poets?

To understand the origin of makeup, we must travel dorsum in time about half dozen,000 years. We get our first glimpse of cosmetics in ancient Arab republic of egypt, where makeup served equally a marker of wealth believed to entreatment to the gods. The elaborate eyeliner characteristic of Egyptian art appeared on men and women equally early equally 4000 BCE. Kohl, rouge, white powders to lighten skin tone, and malachite middle shadow (the greenish colour of which represented the gods Horus and Re) were all in popular employ.

Makeup is mentioned in the Bible also, in both the Jewish scriptures and the Christian Sometime Attestation and New Attestation. The Volume of Jeremiah, which details the titular prophet's ministry building from most 627 BCE to 586 BCE, argues against cosmetics utilise, thereby discouraging vanity: "And you lot, O desolate one, what practise you hateful that you dress in crimson, that y'all deck yourself with ornaments of golden, that yous enlarge your eyes with paint? In vain you adorn yourself. Your lovers despise y'all; they seek your life." In 2 Kings the evil queen Jezebel exemplifies the connection betwixt cosmetics and wickedness, existence described as having "painted her eyes and adorned her head" before her death at the behest of the warrior Jehu (though Jezebel's makeup use was non the impetus for her murder).

Then too was there a disdain for cosmetics among aboriginal Romans, though non for religious reasons. Hygiene products such as bath soaps, deodorants, and moisturizers were used by men and women, and women were encouraged to enhance their natural appearance past removing body hair, but makeup products such as rouge were associated with sex workers and hence were considered a sign of shamelessness. Deriding makeup users is a common theme in Roman poems and comic plays (though theatrical performers constituted i of the few classes of people expected to use cosmetics), and admonitions confronting makeup appear in the personal writings of Roman doctors and philosophers. The elegiac poet Sextus Propertius, for example, wrote that "looks as nature bestowed them are always most becoming." And the philosopher Seneca the Younger, in a letter to his mother, praised the fact that she "never defiled her face with paints or cosmetics."

This Roman view of cosmetics was at least partially rooted in Stoicism, a philosophy that foregrounded moral goodness and human being reason. Stoics regarded beauty every bit intrinsically related to goodness. While an attractive physical course might be desirable, true "beauty" was instead associated with moral acts. Decorating the body with cosmetics implied a vanity or selfishness that, to Stoics, was undesirable. Though Stoicism was non confined to ancient Rome—it was also prevalent among ancient Greek thinkers, some of whom shared the same ideas about makeup—in Rome information technology affected the mainstream opinion of cosmetics. Not every Roman was resistant to makeup; some people connected to rouge their cheeks, whiten their faces, and line their eyes. But the Stoic platonic leaned toward what nosotros today might telephone call "no-makeup makeup"—using skin care products and other toiletries to heighten i's natural appearance, not to decorate it.

So continued a pattern of embracing and rejecting makeup in the Western earth. Cosmetics were so popular in the Byzantine Empire that its citizens gained an international reputation for vanity. The Renaissance era embraced all forms of physical beauty, which people sought to accomplish especially through hair dye and skin lighteners (which, containing powdered pb and other harmful products, often proved toxic). Some other widespread motion against cosmetics appeared in the mid-19th century, when Britain's Queen Victoria declared makeup to be vulgar, and cosmetics once again went out of fashion. Though many women didn't give upwards makeup entirely, many now applied it in secret: who was to say their cheeks weren't naturally rosy?

It wasn't until about the 1920s that highly visible cosmetics, such as cherry-red lipstick and dark eyeliner, reentered the mainstream (at least in the Anglo-American world; not everyone had listened to Queen Victoria and eschewed makeup in the start identify). Equally the beauty industry gained a fiscal foothold, oft in the form of individual women selling to other women, dissenters found that they could no longer compete. Cosmetics, now "productized" and advertised, once more became a mark of wealth and status, and emphasizing concrete features, even for sex appeal, was no longer considered quite and so selfish or wicked. Eventually, advertisers persuaded women to take the opposite view: cosmetics were a necessity.

But that's some other story entirely.