Bald Heads and Black Teeth
The Strange and Fateful History of Female Beauty Trends
Portrait of a Lady in Red (The National Gallery)
Open up your Instagram on any given day and you'd be forgiven for assuming we've always wanted to pump up our peaches and fill out our lips. Bubble butts, trout pouts and liquid tans are all very new millennium, but women have been plucking and pruning and powdering since ancient times. Here are some of the stranger things women have done in the name of beauty in our 7,000 years of cosmetic history.
ANCIENT ROME (625 BC - AD 476) // Forget sun-beds and tanning mitts: these Mediterra- nean matriarchs were all about that creamy, sun-shy skin—and they weren't squeamish about it. It's said that they bought bottles of fresh gladiator sweat and animal fats to rub on their faces; smoothed and softened with snail ash, ground-up oyster shells and mercury; whitened their complexions with white lead and crocodile poo, and fought wrinkles with swan fat and donkey milk. Plenty of these ancient formulas were toxic, and they knew it. Beauty knows no pain, right?
JAPAN (AD 250 - 1900) // You probably go to great lengths to keep your pearly whites white—but for many years in Japan and other Asian and Pacific cultures, black teeth were the bee's knees. Up until the end of the 19th century, Japanese women saw nothing strange in dying their dentures black. This long-standing craze in dental hygiene was called ohaguro. Teeth were dyed with a glaze made from vinegar, iron filings and tannins. Dental darkness was a marker of affluence and sexual attractiveness, but it wasn't all vanity: blackening the teeth likely served a protective function in pre-Colgate times, and in some cases signified a girl's sexual maturation.
CHINA (900-1949) // It's difficult to determine when the first foot was bound, but China's no- torious foot-binding fashion is thought to have emerged among female court dancers—whose impossibly tight dance shoes inspired lust and fascination—sometime during the 10th cen- tury. Foot-binding spread into upper-class households, and by the twelfth century it was all but universal. Bound feet stayed the norm for another 800 years before they died out at the beginning of the 20th century. To the outside world, bound feet meant high status, graceful steps, and a disciplined mind. But what bound feet really meant was pain, disability and dis- ease. Blood flow would short-circuit; entire toes would drop off (all the better for smaller feet!); girls and women would die of gangrene and other infections. The process was long and painful and dangerous, and it's still one of the most criticised beauty practices in history.
RENAISSANCE ITALY (1330 - 1550) // Mamma mia! These glamorous gals were obsessed with their foreheads. Though they hadn't yet discovered the Brazilian, the women of Renaissance Italy fixated over their hairlines, plucking them back so far they were sometimes left with only half a head of hair, convinced that a bright bald forehead was the pinnacle of desirability. Maybe it was their grandfathers' receding hairlines they were after; maybe it was proof of a brain enlarged by education. (On second thought, maybe not.)
USA (1920s) // Ah, the roaring twenties! Fat was out and feisty was in: women were chopping hair, hemming skirts, rouging lips and blacking out eyelashes thanks to a wave of new cos- metic developments. Curves were now a thing of the past, and women, giddy in their new po- litical power, embraced all parts flat-chested and narrow-hipped. The unusual part? Women—primarily the famous flapper dancers—were applying blush to their knees. They donned loose knee-length skirts and rolled down their stockings, letting those cheeky pink pa- tellae peek out! Exactly why knee-rouging was considered so enticing is still under debate. Some say it showed health and vitality; others believe it drew attention to a forbidden area on display; even bolder theorists suggest that it implied recent completion of an on-your-knees sexual act. Regardless, red knees were a risqué move: a daring show of flesh in an era not yet used to women asserting themselves. If only the 2020s were that simple—anyone could spare a minute to rouge those knees if that's all it took to tantalise!
WORLD (1500 - 1960) // What list of crazy beauty trends would be complete without a nod to the time-tested corset? This long-standing shaping device survived four centuries—from the 16th to the early years of the 20th century. Shapes, styles and technologies evolved over time, but the corset always had a single goal: to alter a woman's (and occasionally a man's) natural shape. Although the full extent of their medical consequences is disputed, corsets squeezed ribs and squashed organs; they weakened back muscles, triggered fainting spells, and limited lung capacity. (But they did wonders for waistlines.) Corsets lie in the realm of ridicule now, but we're still forking out cash for SPANX, booty pads and other body-shaping tricks. We might not be fainting on the streets, but how far have we really come?
With today's beauty norms changing faster than our Prime Ministers, the outrageous trends of yesteryear tell an important story. At every point in history we've unapologetically told women to cover up, show more, make that smaller, no—make it bigger again, make that darker, make that lighter, pluck that, change that, change you. Maybe it's a grand delusion we've been under, convincing ourselves that we can tame our wildness; that we can control the uncontrollable. Because if we can thread eyebrows into submission, what can't we do?
In all the nonsense, it's easy to forget that what we obsess over today was probably, at some point, the exact opposite of what our forbearers craved. So if you stare into the mirror tomorrow morning and don't like what's staring back at you, don't worry. In a thousand years, the world might just fawn over your photograph.
