#historical cosmetics

[titleleaf]

GALLIPOT PROJECT SHOP UPDATE 5/22

I've been doing sneaky shop updates for a week or two now but it's finally time to post about them! I've got a bunch of new historically-inspired stuff live on my BigCartel shop -- you can use the code SOLSTICE for 20% off your whole order from now through 6/21.

1840s-Inspired Shaving Soap

A nice puck of tallow shaving soap for use with a shaving brush or your regular-degular hands. Enriched with a shitload of other oils and lightly scented with Atlas cedar, frankincense, and patchouli. I've got an upcoming post about shaving and 1840s shaving soaps so stay tuned!

Carnivale Lip Tints

Three buildable shade options for the girlies (gn) formulated with mango butter, beeswax, and sweet almond oil. All three of these use historically-attested ~*~*lip rouge~*~*~ pigments, incorporating carmine; if there's any interest in vegan versions of these using period vegetable waxes/pigments, let me know!

Shades, top to bottom: Graham Gore Red; Royal Marine Red; Platypus Pond Pink

Historically-Inspired Perfume Oils

Sold in 5ml amber glass apothecary vials -- these are 1840s-inspired but otherwise completely modern because they won't let me distill any floral waters in my one-bedroom apartment. All citrus-based oils used in these blends are FC-free.

Francis Crozier - Ambergris, musk, rosemary, spike lavender, lemon, orange, and petitgrain

James Fitzjames  - Oakmoss, patchouli, Bulgarian rose, jasmine, neroli, and bergamot.

Hydesville Ghost - Atlas cedar, Bulgarian rose, rosemary, benzoin, myrrh.

Huile de Florida - Neroli, bergamot, lemon, rosemary, clove, rose geranium, bitter orange, and cardamom.

I had a ton of fun making these and I look forward to sharing them! These have been in the works since earlier this year and I'm hyped to get them out to people.

Some general updates: I've retired the Gallipot Project Etsy store because, whew, no kidding, Etsy's policies are bad bad. My first run of white Windsor soaps didn't turn out exactly how I'd like it to, but the second batch should be live and available before long. I'm also investigating other mid-19th-century soap formulations and their accompanying scents. Follow my projects and historical cosmetics and hygiene meta at my #unnamed terror fandom beauty project tag!

[angie-massei]

Ads for „Tatras’ Snow” face cream, produced by Falkiewicz company. Wacław Falkiewicz established his company in Paris in 1911, after WWI moved the production to Poznań.

[beanbowlbaggins]

I watched a great video where makeup historian Erin Parsons debunked Queen Elizabeths white face paint myth

but the most interesting bit to me was where she used actual ingredients to recreate historic makeup recipes

and I loved to see how sheer the finished product was. They described it as sheer like zinc sunscreen and brightening and blurring. and it just reminded me of my favorite mineral sunscreen

[chinesehanfu]

[China Makeup history]The production of concealer powder for women in the Northern Wei Dynasty(386–535)of China 1,500 years ago

The author's experience of the production process is as follows:

1.Concealer powder for women in the Northern Wei Dynasty. After experiencing the entire production process, my first impression: the rice soaked for more than 20 days is really smelly! like the biological weapon my painful expression doesn't require any acting skills, but the rice soaked for many days is very soft and sticky, and it is very convenient to rub or grind it by hand (Women with no strength like me can quickly grind it into pulp in 5 minutes)

2.The process is complicated and the production takes more than 30 days. The resulting "rice powder" is indeed delicate. Although its adhesion cannot compare with today's cosmetics, it is still very good as a basic makeup powder for women more than a thousand years ago.

————————

🧚🏻‍Production & Model/Makeup：@曾嚼子

🔗 Xiaohongshu:http://xhslink.com/uc8W4S

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[remitro]

i started playing sky today!!! i really really like it so far :3 i LOVE that we’re faceless!!

[nickysfacts]

Always make sure your lips are drenched in lip gloss before you kiss your boy / girl to mark your territory!😘

💋💋💋

[princess-of-the-glitter-realm]

Japan: Advertising poster for Shiseido Cosmetics, Ginza, Tokyo, Maeda Mitsugu, 1927

Japan: Advertising poster for Shiseido Cosmetics, Ginza, Tokyo, Maeda Mitsugu, 1927. (Photo by: Pictures from History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

[triflesandparsnips]

SOAP MINI-UPDATE:

I'm going to go check on the version 2.0 lavender wash balls.

Will they have undergone a metamorphosis?

Or will they have succumbed to t̶͔̤̪͔̊̐̓͜ẖ̷̒̉̓̎̽̊e̸̪͈͎̓̒̚ ̸̬̖̹̥͜͝b̴̨̡͈͂͛͑̽̓͊ŗ̸̬̹̯̳̠́̏̚ò̸̡̼̼̟͎̑͌͑̑͘w̶̘͕̱͇̒͋͝n̶̹̟͊̉̓̄̓̕ ̴̧̮̘̼̖̳͐̃̚͝ḧ̸͇̩̹̣͖́o̶̖̳̭͔̐́̉ŗ̵̲̉͋̾̄͂͌r̵̨̛̳͚͓̮̐̇̆̉̚ô̴̯̟̹͇̾͒͝͝r̸͓̩̳̉̑͒̒̉̒ ?

I am filled with a terrible foreboding.

[princessbubblegumandjustice]

Quite frankly I don’t want to hear your medically inaccurate critique of corsets during a time where there are cosmetic surgery trends.

Oh no people used garments and padding instead of surgery to give themselves a different silhouette. I 100% rather have bum pads, bust enhancers, and corsets as trends than buccal fat removal, BBL, and surgical body sculpting trends.

Whatever you think about beauty trends and body types, you can remove padding and corsets. You will not die from a properly fitted corset or a couple pillows on your boobs.

Cosmetic surgical procedures are permanent and expensive. Reversing cosmetic procedures or correcting improperly done cosmetic procedures is expensive. Complications from surgery can kill you—like any medical procedure.

[clove-pinks]

It has been over a week since the beef marrow hair oil from @titleleaf arrived (Gallipot Project store link), and finally I had the opportunity to try it this past weekend. I use product in my hair during the work week, and being in my working class villain era it's usually combed away from my face and tucked under a knit hat. I wanted to try the hair oil on my clean, dry hair; and not on a day when it would be immediately smothered by a hat.

I was excited to try this product because the composition is similar to the "Recipe for the Hair" made with beef marrow in the 1830 book The Whole Art of Dress! This was also the book I consulted for instructions on how to use hair oil:

The way to apply oils or grease of any kind to nourish the hair, is to rub it well in at the roots, when its essential virtue can only be of service, and then brush it well. Brushing is as absolutely required by the hair, as washing by the face, it is this that bestows that fine gloss which so much improves the appearance of the hair, at the same time excluding all dandriff [sic]. This ever forms and renders the hair of a dead and unanimated appearance, when not well brushed. A hard penetrating, and a soft brush should be alternately used. The former strengthens the roots of the hair by impelling a brisker circulation of the blood, while the latter bestows the shine or polish.

For my brushes I used a paddle hair brush with plastic bristles (hard), and a military hair brush with natural boar bristles (soft). This is what my hair looks like unoiled:

And after the hair oil!

I probably applied too much of it, although that's debatable considering the historical fashion I'm emulating.

Seated Young Man with Arm Resting on Table, 1840s. Met Collection.

One of the things I loved the most about this product was the scent of clove oil. I went about my day running errands accompanied by a delicious but not overpowering fragrance. Perhaps it liquefied more with warmth, because after several hours it seemed like I had applied it with a heavier hand—although still within the bounds of early Victorian hairstyles, and if anything not as greased-up as some pictures I have seen.

It DOES have styling properties and will hold the hair in place, although not quite with the fixative power of 21st century hair gel. Next time I will try rubbing it in more, and using my hands more than the included dropper. But I'm a fan! It's a rich styling product that should last me for a while, thank you @titleleaf for your Victorian cosmetics!

[titleleaf]

Experiments In Early Victorian Skincare: Bone Marrow Hair Oil

(You can find previous posts on this topic here -- next up we've got some white salves.)

Okay, ngl, this is the part of my self-imposed mission that I have been considering with the most trepidation. Not because marrow oil is objectively, in some way, less clean or more gross than the other rendered animal fats used in hair and skincare products of the era -- I found the process of buying and preparing to handle these marrow bones to be surprisingly unsettling. Not anything about the purchasing process or sourcing beef bones, either, which was as normal and cordial as any other specialty meat purchase I might make -- all I can chalk it up to is looking at the bones themselves and being acutely aware that… hey… crack open my own femur and you'd find marrow there too. [CW for a lot of animal meat, bone, and fat to follow if you're squeamish or prefer to avoid it.]

Marrow holds a horror for me that I find hard to understand in any other terms than the knowledge that I, too, am made of meat -- fittingly given The Terror's themes of subsistence cannibalism, arbitrary European squeamishness, and the smudgy line between human and animal. (In the butcher's shop, one of my friends saw my squeamishness and leaned over to whisper "just pretend you're in The Terror!", so that's where my brand is at right now. She didn't even know about this whole project, just that I'm a ghoul.)

To get the marrow out of these bones, I effectively made the most gross, boring bone broth imaginable -- I pressure cooked the frozen marrow bones (maybe eight-inch lengths of some long cattle bone, around two and a half pounds) in six cups of water for four hours and let the pressure release naturally. When I opened up my Instant Pot, all the remaining shreds of flesh had cooked off of the bones and it was already looking rich and oily The smell of boiled bones isn't gross or repulsive in any way, but it doesn't smell exactly good either, and I made it worse by immediately splashing myself with still piping-hot boiled bone water. The first thing I realized after cussing and tending to the burn was that the remaining liquid was seriously fatty -- the few places it had splashed besides my bare hand were already congealing with milky-colored oil -- and that the cooked marrow slid out of the cylinder of bone all in one piece, no prodding necessary. The bones looked… about like I'd expect boiled beef bones to look, after growing up in a household full of big carnivorous dogs who liked to chew on bones and antlers and stuff, but the inside structures were surprisingly delicate and lacy.

I let the vile bone water cool and thanked my lucky fucking stars I wasn't having to eat plain bone water. My plan was to let the """""broth""""" cool in the refrigerator and then skim the fat from the top, discard any lingering meaty solids and liquid runoff, then melt and filter the rendered fat.

I poured it into a casserole dish to maximize the surface area and promised myself I would wait. I did not wait. I waited like, 4 hours, then broke the cooled layer of fat on top like a pane of ice, picked it off with a spatula, melted it down, and poured the resulting slurry of rendered fat and lingering meat debris into a jar. Including the slurry of meat debris, which rapidly sank to the bottom.

The oil… honestly was much less gross than the bone water had been. It's a nice rich yellow color when liquid and relatively odorless; what smell there was felt weirdly comforting, and then I realized I associate the smell of simmered bones and breaking-down collagen with Amish-style pot pie. (Not incidentally, also a dish that through long-term simmering transforms left-over bones and any lingering shreds of meat on them into a rich fatty broth.) It's hard to imagine a Victorian housewife or thrifty cook balking at any part of this. If I'd been born in 1815, this whole process would have been second nature to me, not a harrowing meat ordeal but a part of the practice of domestic economy. Kind of cool stuff.

I re-heated the oil in a water bath, filtered it through a coffee filter because I can't find my fucking cheesecloth and wasn't super relishing the thought of reusing fatty cheesecloth-- this may have been my undoing because it required several layers' worth of coffee filtering to keep the weight of the hot oil from just blasting through the seams. I was able to extract around four ounces of liquid fat, nearly halved, but a more efficient filter setup could have saved a good chunk of that. My hands got good and lubed up during the process and I really felt a kinship with Ishmael in his A Squeeze Of The Hand rhapsodies, as well as a genuine horror of how much cleanup this was going to take. Straight, I'd say this stuff is uncomfortably rich, and I don't know how easily it'd be absorbed into the skin.

(from Beasley's General Receipt-Book)

What to do with around four ounces of clarified beef marrow? I ended up going wit Beasley's recipe for marrow oil instead of the promised fluide de Java, not wanting to tinker with melting down wax, but not having a frame of reference for "the desired consistence" threw up a hurdle -- seeing it alongside hair oils it seemed reasonable to wager we're going for a consistency slightly more substantial than almond or olive oil alone. but still liquid at room temperature. (Liquid at polar temperatures, harder to say.) I went with a 1:1 ratio of clarified marrow to sweet almond oil, scented with clove bud, cedar, and sweet orange -- I had to go back to up the amount of fragrance after realizing quite how aromatic the marrow still was. (If I had my druthers, I love the smell of clove, but among essential oils it's particularly touchy due to its eugenol content so I kept things below the IFRA threshold for dermal use. If you make any kind of fragranced product, from apparel to solid perfume to baby wipes, you should check out IFRA's standards.

Some of the recipes I see in other texts suggest that the yellowness of marrow-based hair oils is a distinguishing quality, which might explain the use of olive oil in Beasley's fluide de Java recipe; at room temperature the mix has a pale yellow, cloudy consistency while remaining freely liquid. Frankly it still smells uncomfortably beefy. Later writer Arnold J. Cooley could have given me a better sense of the ratio of marrow to almond oil for a marrow-oil hair treatment -- he recommends 3 parts marrow oil to 8 parts almond.

If you're interested in somebody absolutely spilling the tea on the state of the Victorian hair oil retail market, his chapter on it is a treat. In particular he has a low opinion of fluide de Java:

If I were making this over again I'd probably hew to the Cooley measurements, the better to stretch the amount of marrow, and up the fragrance even further -- but I'm already dreading using this stuff on my hair.

[angie-massei]

[phoenixdown-and-fairydust]

Weird question, what's up with all the green slander among makeup artist? I swear 8-9/10 I've seen have been like "ew, the ugly colour, I'm only using this because I've been challenged to" ,"it reminds me of horrible toxic things and slimy animals" , " it's okay if you want to look like a witch, or the frog" or "I don't like green, I hate it, I don't think I know anyone who actually likes or looks good in green makeup"(all different artists' sentiments btw)

And I'm over here deliberately buying green heavy eyeshadow palettes and other cosmetics because 1) it's my favourite colour for various reasons 2) I have green eyes and in addition to making them pop I think my weird nonsense complexion and blonde hair are enhanced by green. But also, I mean, I know I look like I rolled out of a fairytale forest glen, i am by no means the only person to look good in green. Plenty of people do

Why all the green hate? I don't get it.

[thesmileshapersventura]

Unlock the Hidden Mysteries of Dental Veneers!

Embark on a time-travel expedition with us to discover the hidden mysteries and captivating evolution. Learn about the transformative invention of Dental Veneers and trace its fascinating origins!