Beauty and Hygiene Products

The alteration of appearance through the use of cosmetics has been a practice for thousands of years. Oils and fragrances have been used for ceremonies and religious rites for just as long. In Ancient Egypt aristocrats applied minerals to their faces to provide color and definition of features. The Greeks were also known to paint their faces and the Romans used oil-based perfumes in baths and fountains, and even applied them to their weapons. The Roman Lucian is noted to have talked about women and cosmetics in his time, referring to their polishing their teeth and eyebrows.

Alcohol-based perfumes were developed in the Middle East and were brought to Europe by the Crusaders in the thirteenth century. The art of creating new fragrances by blending ingredients was developed in France in the seventeenth century. Natural perfumes were made from ingredients like flowers, roots, fruits, rinds or barks, or any other naturally occurring aroma containing product. This was an incredibly labor intensive process that required enormous amounts of natural ingredients to produce small quantities of fragrance. In the nineteenth century chemical processes were developed to replace the natural methods.

For many centuries, and into the nineteenth, a whitening agent for the face was used, composed of carbonate, hydroxide, and lead oxide. These agents, cumulatively stored in the body with each use, were responsible for numerous physical problems and resulted in some cases in muscle paralysis or death. By the nineteenth century zinc oxide became widely used as a facial powder, replacing this more deadly mixture. Other poisonous substances were used in eyeshadow (lead and antimony sulfide), lip reddeners (mercuric sulfide), and to make one's eyes sparkle (belladonna, or deadly nightshade