A Recipe for Disaster!

As you can tell from the blog titles that this blog post is going to get a little bit messy. In the 17th Century if you wanted to be seen as classy, all you had to do was look pale. Sounds simple right? Well not back then, they didn't have their standard white face paint from a party shop. Back then if you wanted pale face, you had to make a cream from crushed white chalk or white lead, mixed in with white of egg and vinegar. Sounds yummy doesn't it?

As you are probably wondering, wouldn't that be horrible to your skin? You are indeed correct. The use of these home made foundation, especially ones containing lead, did nothing good for their skin. After repeatedly using it over and over, it left them with scars and blemishes. 

To get red cheeks, they would add a little cerise powder (white lead and adding red colouring), or they will buy in Spanish paper which already had red dye on it so they could rub it on their face. To get red lips they would apply fruit juice of cochineal. 

With that kind of nasty stuff on your face, they would need remedies for spots and blemishes, ranged from the application of lemon-juice or rosewater to dubious concoctions of mercury, alum, honey and eggshells. Indeed, washing one's face with mercury was a common period "facial peel" used to make a woman's skin soft and fresh. 

Elizabethans would try to remove stains by rubbing their teeth with coral, pumice, and stone, which would remove the dental enamel and leaving their teeth sensitive. Other remedies included rubbing a mixture of vinegar and honey onto stained teeth. This mixture, combined with the loss of enamel, left many people with rotting teeth. 

Bibliography:

http://www.elizabethancostume.net/makeup.html 

http://www.elizabethan-era.org.uk/elizabethan-make-up.htm

https://www.wemakespokanesmile.com/cant-shakespeare-dentistry-elizabethan-era/