Beauty and Cosmetics 1550-1950 By Sarah Jane Downing.
This book discusses how views on beauty and cosmetics has
changed over time and how the use of products was viewed differently by
different people. The book describes that at the beginning of the 1800’s before
the Victorian era the use of products such as powders, pastes and paints to
achieve beauty was seen as cheating beauty and that if a women had to do this
then she was defiantly not beautiful underneath it. It was also seen as
cheating because the use of such products suggested that the women was lazy and
wasn’t prepared to work hard to achieve beauty. This was because at the time
methods such as healthy eating and exercise were seen as the most appropriate
way of attaining a desirable figure and looks. Only products that were used on
the skin and then removed were seen as acceptable as they would not be seen
when in public. For example books containing recipes for homemade beauty
treatments were very popular and they promoted the use of natural products such
as sugar and lavender to improve the skins appearance.
These views carried on through the middle of the 1800’s and
it became more apparent that women were expected to be modest and almost in the
background of society as all the attention was supposed to be on their husbands
in a very male dominated world where women were viewed as far inferior. However
there were some exceptions and people who tried to go against these values such
as female performers who had made a name for themselves on stage now wanted to
be just as extravagant in the way they looked in public so to maintain their
stage persona's.
Companies became to
produce cosmetics using similar ingredients that had been used in the past such
as lead and also adding new products such as arsenic which were very dangerous
however making a profit from women’s want to attain a desirable look seemed
more important. The products were often ordered as to buy them from a shop in
public would be condemned and seen as very outrageous. The extent of the
harmful effects of the products was unknown as very little tests were done on
products before selling them. There were reports of bad reactions that scared
the skin, the skin becoming leathery in texture and in general the long term
use of the products made it worse than it originally was. The products
themselves sometimes reacted with gases in the air for example bismuth which
was used in powder products turned black if sulphur was in the air which it
would be around gas lights and fires according to the writer Arnold James
Cooley.
However women
continued to use such products as there was still pressure on them to look good
for their husbands without it appearing that they had used cosmetics in order
to do so. Women would go to extreme length such as visiting sellers such as
Madame Sarah Rachel Leverson in salons who charged extortionate prices for
products she claimed helped to achieve beauty. The visiting of such
establishments would be viewed very dimly and so the clients would do what they
could to prevent people from knowing they had visited such places, even
sometimes being blackmailed by the sellers themselves. The women often didn’t
report the blackmailing as if they did it would be known they had visited
salons like Madame Sarah Rachel Leversons and therefore would damage their
reputations. Only on very rare occasions were sellers sentenced such as Madame
Sarah Rachel Leverson who was sentenced for five years in 1868 for fraud.
No comments:
Post a Comment