Before a variety of cosmetics made their way into women’s vanity cases, there was already a rich history of beauty practices in ancient China, where beauty was an important part of art, symbolism, and social ranking. The Tang and Song dynasties developed methods for making cosmetics using natural materials and mineral compounds to embody aesthetics shaped by social status and the religious and cultural trends of the time. Many techniques used back in the day may seem rather exotic nowadays. Let’s take a look at some.
The search for beauty predates the cosmetics industry’s worth in billions of dollars as we see it today.
Cosmetics for lips first emerged in China centuries before any lipstick for sale. Women shaded their lips with safflower, vermilion pigments, beeswax, animal fat, and herbal extracts. The shape of the lips changed greatly based on the dynasty that ruled. In the Tang dynasty, people preferred very small lips resembling cherries, while at other times, bigger shapes were more in style. Eyebrows have always been seen as an important feature of the face. Back then, women in China would darken their eyebrows by using naturally obtained black minerals and soot, as well as other graphite-based materials. A few of their recipes used stone. Depending on the fashion trends, eyebrow shapes changed too. Texts from age-old times mention fashion styles that look like leaves of willow trees or some distant mountains, crescent moons, and butterfly wings. Women at times used to remove the hair from their eyebrows in a certain area before redrawing their eyebrows completely. Among the most interesting ingredients in old Chinese cosmetics was animal fat in its refined form. It was not used as an ingredient of makeup itself but rather as a base for makeup products. This fat was combined with various colours coming from flowers and minerals, thus providing various creams, blushes, and lip colouring that had better adherence properties and kept the cosmetics of good quality. It is similar to the technology of modern cosmetics as well, where oils and waxes are combined with pigments. By the time of the Tang dynasty, Chang’an was one of the largest and most cosmopolitan civil centres in the world, where imports from foreign lands provided information about beauty innovations, along with perfume and other products from Central Asia and other regions.
