Beauty Products Across the Ages
By Michael Usry
How did we as people get to the point where we spend billions every year on cosmetics and it became the social standard for women to wear cosmetics everyday Certainly a woman way back in old times did not just wake up one morning and decide to apply eyelashes, lipstick, eyeliner, base, and blush all at once. No, it was, like many things, a building up of things from past times.
The Egyptians were the first to use cosmetics. That was four millenia ago. Cleanliness and appearance were very important to the Egyptians. Egyptians had the belief that the appearance was in direct juncture with the constitution of the spirit. They tried to always appear neat and smell pleasant. And with a society who values their looks, societies are assuredly going to have members who are going to attempt to stand out. The Egyptians, being the cutting edge culture they were, had cosmetics for reasons that were even more practical than just attempting to look good.
A combination of lead ore and copper called Mesdemet was the origin of eye shadow. The dark hues they believed would ward off evil eyes from their own. It was also an effective sterilizer and bug deterrent. Kohl was a dark substance that was also applied around the eyes in an oval shape. Kohl was a combination of lead, ash, ochre, copper, and burnt almonds. To further complement their appearance, Egyptians would apply a mixture of water and red clay to the cheekbone area. They would also paint their nails shades of orange and yellow with a chemical known as henna.
As different groups of people began to interact with each other more often, the habit of make-up was adopted by the Greeks from the Egyptians. Greek women would color themselves a pale shade with a base that contained lead inside. On more than one occasion this ended up being deadly. As the Romans began to pick up the make-up practice, the pursuit of beauty became much less about practicality and took a turn into much more unusual routes. They would paint their nails with a mixture of sheeps blood and cooked body fat. An ancient Roman man once stated, A woman without paint is like food without salt.
Long after the Egyptian empire crumbled, the fashion norm around the world was a pale complexion. Only women who were low-class and had to labor out in the field all day with their husbands had rough, tanned skin. The upper class women obviously did not have to endure hard labor like that therefore they stayed inside and had white complexions.
Wealth was often measured by a person's white skin color. A person was not obligated to labor if they had enough riches. So a light skin tone was extremely crucial to some members of society. To get this appearance, women (and men as well) would apply a combination of hydroxide, lead oxide, and carbonate in a powdered form to apply to their faces and skin. Unfortunately, this caused a sometimes lethal side effect, lead poisoning.To cure this, chemists in the nineteenth century at last discovered a combination of zinc oxide that made the skin able to breathe and kept people out of that annoying lead poisoning death. It was so effective that it is still practiced today by cosmetics manufacturers.
Lavish and glamorous parties were thrown by city women with throw away wealth in the Edwardian era of England. As hostesses of the function, it was necessary for them
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to be the best looking woman at the function, so it was crucially important for them to look as youthful as they possibly could. City and exotic lifestyles with factors like polluted air produced by the cities at that time, unhealthy diets, and little or no exercise aged the women fast. Anti-aging and facial creams to disguise the wrinkles were heavily relied upon by women in this era. They would also go to the beauty salon. It was a little different back then than it is in the present. Ladies would sneak into the back of the salons and cover their faces as they entered. One of the most famous of these secret beauty houses was the House of Cyclax, who would sell foams and rouges to women. Mrs. Henning, the owner, sold and invented multiple products for her frenzied customers who did not want anybody to know that they were getting older.
Today's woman is the benefactor of all these years of experience with a practically never ending choice of beauty products for any look they want to achieve. The cosmetics business has become a billion dollar industry with literally thousands of competing companies. products sell year round and even in times of depression. So ladies, give thanks to your ancestors and their concern for their personal looks for your own that you have today. There were possibly mornings when they woke up and didn't really feel like going through the hassle of putting on their face either.
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