Dangers of Early Makeup (Continued)

Skin-whitening lotion was not the only dangerous beauty product that women used, there were also recipes for eye drops, rouge, and powder that contained harmful ingredients. As in lotion, lead was a common ingredient in rouge; though according to one nineteenth-century book, rouges without lead were superior to those with lead due to their preferred color.[11] Nevertheless, many women used lead-based rouges. Besides lead, women put drops of prussic acid into their eyes to enhance their brilliancy and belladonna onto their eyebrows to make them glossier.[12] Lastly, this pictured freckle-removing lotion recipe contains mercury. All of these practices were extremely harmful to women. In some cases, the usage of such products resulted in blindness.[13]

To be beautiful in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century was often dangerous and sometimes deadly. Women sat before their vanities, meticulously following recipe upon recipe that promised pale skin, glossy eyebrows, and radiant eyes. In a time when there was “no higher mission [for women] than to be beautiful,”[15] the cost of beauty often came at the price of permanent injury or even death.

[11] Montez, The Arts of Beauty; or, Secrets of a Ladies Toilet, 48.

[12] Mary Melendy, Perfect Womanhood for Maidens, Wives, Mothers (Chicago: K. T. Boland, 1903) 325.

[13] “The History of Makeup.”

[14] “A History of Cosmetics from Ancient Times.”

[15] Montez, The Arts of Beauty; or, Secrets of a Ladies Toilet, xv.