All dolled up.

While quite terribly sick over the past few days, I've been indulging in one of my most favourite guilty pleasures - period/costume dramas - specifically Downton Abbey (2010) (fabulous, marvellous, amazing and shocking) and Wives and Daughters (1999) (charming, sweet and romantic). What I have noticed quite a bit is the lack of makeup the women seem to be wearing, or not wearing as it were. So being a cosmetics fanatic, I googled makeup in the 19th century and stumbled across such interesting tidbits about what women and men used to do in terms of prettying themselves up.

"The Great Cover Up

In the 17th century, men and women used makeup to limited degree; ceruse was used as a base, and a cheek and lip reddeners were sometimes applied. From the late 1600s forward, makeup began to get heavier. First, white paint was applied, then white powder, then a brownish rouge, and red lip color.

“Beauty patches”—pieces of velvet or silk cut into the shape of stars, moons, hearts, and similar figures—were frequently applied to the face and body to cover smallpox scars, and similar marks. A “secret language” even developed through their use: A patch near the mouth meant you were flirtatious; one next to the right cheek signaled you were married; one on the left cheek announced you were engaged; one at the corner of the eye meant you were somebody’s mistress."

A secret code! I thought this was so unbelievably cool, and even though I think it might have looked rather strange I wish something like this occurred today.

More fun facts I discovered were:

• At some point, people used mouse fur to shape and fill in their eyebrows (YUCK)
• To make their eyes bright, women would wash them with arsenic or belladonna - which are both poisonous
• Some women ate chalk or drank iodine to achieve the coveted pale complexion
• Historians speculate that TB was so common in the 18th-19th century that the trend of a pale complexion arose from people wanting to look as if suffering from the disease!
• People would even paint themselves with white lead or bleed themselves
• Women only started shaving their underarm hair in 1915 when a model without any appeared on the cover of Harpers Bazaar

Jessica Brown-Findlay as Sybil Crawley in Downton Abbey. She is so very pretty.

Adios amigos :)