Makeup

Women and makeup have a complicated relationship.
Some revel in it, running from CVS to Sephora to try on every last trend, delighting in transforming their look with the flick of a brush. Others keep it simple, sticking with the bare basics and often forgetting to put it on at all. And many abhor the stuff, either because they don’t like its feel on their skin, or don’t like what it stands for.

Love it or hate it, women have been using makeup, in different forms, for a very long time.
Fashionable sixth century women made their faces paler by bleeding themselves, either directly or with the help of leeches. During the Italian Renaissance, women coated their faces with toxic chemicals including arsenic, lead and mercury.

It was even popular to look sickly in the 19^th century, when tuberculosis was considered a “romantic” disease. Women of that era emphasized the circles under their eyes and used rouge to look flushed with fever.

If you look at makeup use across cultures and eras, a pattern emerges. In theory, one could put color anywhere on the face. But all cultures have independently agreed on certain beauty principles: Makeup is used to even the complexion, darken the eyes, pinken the cheeks and redden the lips, no matter if you’re a doll-like Japanese Geisha, an Ancient Egyptian or a modern American woman primping for a Saturday night out.