Who Was Makeup Made For Originially

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

Here'south a question for makeup users and nonusers alike: Would you believe that philosophers once determined makeup trends?

What well-nigh poets?

To sympathise the origin of makeup, we must travel back in fourth dimension almost six,000 years. We go our first glimpse of cosmetics in ancient Egypt, where makeup served as a marker of wealth believed to appeal to the gods. The elaborate eyeliner characteristic of Egyptian fine art appeared on men and women every bit early every bit 4000 BCE. Kohl, rouge, white powders to lighten skin tone, and malachite eye shadow (the green colour of which represented the gods Horus and Re) were all in popular use.

Makeup is mentioned in the Bible also, in both the Jewish scriptures and the Christian Erstwhile Testament and New Testament. The Book of Jeremiah, which details the titular prophet's ministry from near 627 BCE to 586 BCE, argues confronting cosmetics apply, thereby discouraging vanity: "And you lot, O desolate one, what do you mean that you wearing apparel in blood-red, that yous deck yourself with ornaments of golden, that you enlarge your eyes with pigment? In vain you lot beautify yourself. Your lovers despise you; they seek your life." In ii Kings the evil queen Jezebel exemplifies the connection between cosmetics and wickedness, being described as having "painted her eyes and adorned her head" before her death at the behest of the warrior Jehu (though Jezebel's makeup utilise was not the impetus for her murder).

So likewise was there a disdain for cosmetics among ancient Romans, though not for religious reasons. Hygiene products such equally bath soaps, deodorants, and moisturizers were used by men and women, and women were encouraged to enhance their natural appearance by removing body hair, simply 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 against makeup appear in the personal writings of Roman doctors and philosophers. The elegiac poet Sextus Propertius, for instance, 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 confront with paints or cosmetics."

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

And so continued a pattern of embracing and rejecting makeup in the Western world. Cosmetics were then pop 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 attain specially through hair dye and skin lighteners (which, containing powdered atomic number 82 and other harmful products, often proved toxic). Some other widespread movement against cosmetics appeared in the mid-19th century, when Britain'south Queen Victoria declared makeup to be vulgar, and cosmetics once over again went out of fashion. Though many women didn't give up makeup entirely, many now applied information technology 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 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 first identify). Every bit the beauty industry gained a financial 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, again became a marking of wealth and status, and emphasizing physical features, fifty-fifty for sex entreatment, was no longer considered quite so selfish or wicked. Somewhen, advertisers persuaded women to have the opposite view: cosmetics were a necessity.

But that'due south another story entirely.