Discover the stories, styles, and cultural shifts behind makeup across eras and cultures.
Makeup is a mirror of the world.
Different eras.
Same desire
to feel beautiful.
A hundred thousand years of evidence, placed where it was found. Drag the years, or pick an era.
Arrow keys move between pins, Enter selects one, Escape hides its card.
259 events between c. 100,000 BCE and 2026. Select a pin to read it.
The so-called Hoops and Heels Act of 1770 was never passed, and the text that circulates under that name is a satire assembled from eighteenth-century anxieties about witchcraft, divorce and deception.
The two deaths most often attributed to lead cosmetics — Elizabeth I and Maria Gunning — both rest on evidence that scholarship treats far more cautiously than popular accounts do.
Surviving pellets of synthetic lead white from fifth- to third-century BCE burials give a physical record of the Greek face white, and an analysis proposing how it was made.
A survey of kohl samples from Oman established that the word names a colour and a use rather than a material — with consequences that run from medieval pharmacology to a modern import alert.
The familiar account of Ziryab reaches modern writing through a seventeenth-century compilation of an eleventh-century history that itself drew on seven earlier and sometimes contradictory sources.
Al-Kindi’s treatise on the chemistry of perfume describes distillation as a craft aimed at a product, which distinguishes it sharply from the alchemical distillation of the same period.
Adornment with a job to do. The practices outlive the reasons given for them.
One mirror, every era of the face, and a song. Watch Vivien make up her way through history, with every page the song sings about following along beneath the film.
Watch the filmThe pot, the tube, the compact, the mirror. What people kept their face in, and what the container tells us that the cosmetic does not.
Who founded them, when, and what each one argued the face was for.
