#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

[ballpointbananana]

Actually, that brand is Little Bits on Etsy! That shop has so many cosmetics/skincare/hair care stuff, and it's all based on historical recipes!! I love their stuff so much!!

Here's the link:

https://www.etsy.com/shop/LitttleBits?ref=usf_2020

We are so unnecessarily harsh to historical people and their trends. “ew why did people want their hair gray why would you put powder on your head” shut up YOU DO put powder on your head it’s called dry shampoo. It’s the exact same thing it just has a different name now. It also came in lots of different colors back besides white, sometimes you could even get it in pink but no one remembers that. And young people are still dyeing their hair gray for fashion. The only difference is we need less powder now because we wash our hair more so the trend is shiny hair and back then it was matte.

In three hundred years kids will be making fun of you too. You are not immune to fashion trends

[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.

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🧚🏻‍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!!

[hearthmistress]

the argument from corset defenders that they're just trying to say corsets "weren't universal torture devices" and/or "people didn't typically tightlace" is rendered automatically null by the fact that this is fundamentally a straw man argument - one that is made more so because they're purposefully ignoring valid critiques of corsetry - ones that actually take historical context into consideration (i.e. the role of the patriarchy, white women's bodies as tools of colonialism, fashion interlinked with industrialization and capitalism, real women's testimonies and feelings towards it, dress reform and medical history) when discussing clothing and fashion history - to repeat this rhetoric.

most critiques I've seen have encompassed discussions of gender, labour, and colonial history. It's a shame that people keep insisting on seeing the corset as (at best) a neutral item and devoid of social/racial/gendered context, and rather than as something that directly interacts with those topics, and therefore cannot be simply rendered as neutral item of clothing.

[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.

[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]

[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.

[creative-core]

"The Evolution of Beauty: Kajal for Scar and Spot Concealment in 2104"

In 2095, the world had redefined beauty and technology in ways that Samaira could never have imagined. As a celebrated abstract artist, her life revolved around colors, textures, and emotions. Her work hung in galleries across the globe, each piece revealing something deeply personal. Yet, despite her success, one aspect of her life remained a quiet insecurity: the scar that trailed along her cheek, a reminder of an accident from her youth. While Samaira's paintings spoke of bold expression, her own reflection often felt muted by the mark of her past.

With her first solo exhibition in Paris approaching, Samaira found herself staring at the sleek, silver kajal stick sitting on her vanity. But this wasn’t the kajal of centuries past, meant for highlighting eyes. This futuristic kajal was engineered for something far more personal—concealing scars, spots, and imperfections. A product that merged design with cutting-edge technology, it promised seamless coverage while maintaining a natural finish, crafted for people just like her.

As Samaira picked up the kajal, she felt a sense of curiosity. The applicator’s design was a marvel in itself—minimalist yet futuristic, with biodegradable materials that aligned with the world’s new standard of sustainable luxury. A soft LED light embedded in the applicator gently turned green, indicating that the product had adapted to her skin tone, ready for use. The small device embodied the perfect marriage of form and function, an answer to the future of beauty products.

With one smooth glide, the advanced nanotechnology within the kajal took over, adjusting to the exact texture and shade of her skin. The creamy formula melted into her cheek, covering the scar with precision, its micro-pigments adapting to light and shadows in a way that made her skin look untouched, flawless. No longer just a cosmetic tool, this kajal had become a multi-functional, skin-healing product, enriched with bioengineered vitamins that worked to heal and nourish as it concealed. In seconds, her skin looked like it had never been marked.

Stepping away from the mirror, Samaira felt a newfound confidence wash over her. She wasn’t masking her past—she was enhancing her future. The exhibition was no longer a nerve-wracking event; it was a platform for her to express not only her art but her redefined self. The kajal for scar and spot concealment had given her the power to choose how and when her scar played a role in her story.

In the gallery, surrounded by critics, collectors, and admirers, Samaira stood under the lights, her art glowing as brightly as her presence. Her scar, once a source of vulnerability, had faded into the background. The kajal had done more than provide coverage; it had given her the freedom to be seen for her art and her talent, not her insecurities.

This futuristic kajal had shifted the narrative of beauty. It wasn’t about concealing flaws—it was about empowering people to decide how they wanted to be seen. Its design, enhanced by precision technology, had made it an essential tool for both personal care and artistic expression. From stage actors wanting to alter their appearance with dramatic ease to everyday individuals desiring a perfect blend of cosmetic and skin-enhancing benefits, this kajal had redefined the meaning of multi-functional beauty.

In a world that prioritized both innovation and sustainability, the kajal became a symbol of the new era—one where beauty products didn’t just serve superficial needs but intertwined with health, self-expression, and eco-conscious design. This wasn’t merely makeup; it was a transformative experience, allowing users to enhance their natural features, conceal scars, or simply blend imperfections, all with a product designed to heal and improve skin health over time.

For Samaira, the power of this kajal went beyond its physical capabilities. It offered her the choice to embrace her past or step into the future with confidence, shifting between the two with a single stroke. The future of beauty had arrived—not in heavy foundations or dramatic overhauls, but in products that allowed subtle, seamless transformations that spoke to both the personal and the practical.

As she walked through her exhibit, receiving compliments and smiles from patrons, Samaira knew that her scar wasn’t erased—it was simply no longer the defining feature of her narrative. The scar and spot concealment kajal had done more than blend into her skin; it had woven itself into the very fabric of her evolving identity, a reflection of the world’s increasing focus on design, technology, and self-empowerment.

This was the future—where beauty was about choice, confidence, and innovation. And Samaira, in that moment, felt truly at home in it.