Shout it from the rooftops! It's amazing how many people still buy into the "people used to be stupid, but we're so much better" narrative about history.
I guess perpetuating the myth makes us feel better about some of the dumb things we as a modern society do to our bodies, environments & neighbours...?? 🙈
I've seen a reel about how Queen Elizabeth the 1st wore "highly toxic" makeup, including her lipstick... Bruh... If it was so highly toxic as the post calimed she wouldn't have lived up to 69 of age. It's always good to take information with a grain of salt. Thank u for your video! ❤️
As someone who loves wigs and beehive wigs, it upset me to realize that it wasn’t until the 1960s where bouffant wigs were super popular. I always imagined the amazing wigs of the 1700s but alas they weren’t very common 😢
I am so tempted to send this to an 18th century stately home run by the OPW (Office of Public Works) that I visited in 2019. The tour guide was doing well, talking about actual repairs that had been done to the home and helped carry out himself, until he got to the clothing and beauty bit. I gritted my teeth and held my breath. It was as bad as you could imagine. He lumped the whole 17th, 18th and 19th centuries in together, talking about how they never bathed, used lead make-up, wore arsenic green, and mouse eyebrows (because their eyebrows all fell out due to all the lead). I could bear it no longer and told him (and the whole group) that the eyebrows were only referenced in satirical sources and listed out a few of the ones you mentioned. He said someone with a PhD said that they did. I think he meant the Lucy Worsley tweet that went out in 2014, and if so, she's got a lot to answer for, because this particular tour guide used it as carte blanche to keep spreading the most egregious falsehoods to who knows how many hundreds of people over the years.
Swift's "A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed" is rather explicit that Corinna's artifice is all that keeps her from imprisonment, indenture, and worse. I've always liked it for how it takes the trope of the undressing scene and initially appears to be turning it into a typical stab at ladies who wear too much makeup etc., but then the poem turns from that into a critique of society and the mechanisms that necessitate Corinna's 'deceptions'. The poem's final line seems to return to the derisive tone that it opens with, but the true sympathies seem clear in these lines: The nymph, tho’ in this mangled plight, Must ev’ry morn her limbs unite. But how shall I describe her arts To recollect the scattered parts? Or shew the anguish, toil, and pain, Of gath’ring up herself again? In the end, I'd hazard a guess that Swift would agree that rumours about mouse eyebrows and poison makeup are belittling, othering, and poorly researched.
Thank you for the research and this video! The sentence about the historians of the future looking back at our beauty practices based on one source is really poignant. There is so much which is lost, warped and overexaggerated in the construction and uninformed re-telling of "historical facts".
Yeah, can't help feeling we'll see historians in 200 years' time talking about how all women in the 2020s injected fat into their butts to look super-curvy, based on a misunderstanding of the fairly-niche BBL trend embraced by a few Kardashian super-stans etc...? 😏
All I can think about the mouse eyebrows is that there's no smoke without fire. To have multiple pieces satirizing it, something had to be going on. Were some people using mouse skins as false eyebrows? (It could be a reasonable substitute, in an era without synthetic fakes) Was it a critique of women with bushy or ungroomed eyebrows? I'm prepared to accept that mouse eyebrows weren't a real thing, or weren't widespread. But where did this wacky idea come from?
It was usual for women to use burnt cloves to colour in their brows, so it could be a simple as someone saying “her brows are so dark/fluffy, they look like they’re mouse skin” - who knows!
@@SerenaDyer It makes you wonder if something like "apple bottom jeans" is going to result in people thinking there were actual apples involved somehow.
When men find out about how women can shapeshift with makeup and fashion trends, rather than telling the church, they just make satirical cartoons about it.
Good grief, I dread to think what future historians will make of our beauty regimes! Even before they look at satires. Thank you - I've always had a problem with the 'gosh those people in the past were so stupid' attitude. If you look at what we actually do, and products actually put in cosmetics, we are no better. At least in the past if someone wanted a bigger breast, bum, hips ...etc they used external padding / devices that could be changed or removed at will - we have silicone implants. We look back at the use of wigs and assume that they wee hiding something awful, yet wigs are used at the moment for fun or as part of protective haircare.
