Many of these cosmetics, of course, contained substances now known to be poisonous: ceruse (white lead), cinnabar (red mercury) and other substances thick with arsenic or sulphur. Doctors of the mid-1700s, alert to the dangers of excessive make-up, came up with a radical new beauty regimen – simply washing the face and keeping it clean – but this was slow to catch on.
In 1764, Antoine Hornot, a distiller to the royal family and prolific writer, offered his own recipe for keeping the skin healthy and pale, using only natural ingredients:
“A distillation of four calves’ feet, two dozen egg whites and egg shells, a calf’s cheek, one chicken skinned alive, a lemon, a half ounce of white poppy seeds, half a loaf of bread, three buckets of goats milk and four little dogs, one or two days old.”
Source: Antoine de Hornot (writing as M. Dejean), Traitee des Odeurs, 1764. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.