Facing Beauty

Around 1859 a series of fashionplates from the late eighteenth century inspired Charles Baudelaire to contemplate beauty and to write arguably his most famous essay. In The Painter of Modern Life the poet argued that ›the idea of beauty which man creates for himself‹ did not only imprint itself on clothes but ›in the long run even ends by subtly penetrating the very features of his face.‹ Baudelaire believed that beauty was made up of two parts: an invariable element that is eternal and a ›relative, circumstantial element‹ that differs in various periods.

The interaction between, and disentangling of, universal and period specific notions of beauty is also a recurrent theme of Aileen Ribeiro’s lavishly illustrated and elegantly designed book Facing Beauty: Painted Women and Cosmetic Art. Ribeiro does not only provide a beautifully written, comprehensive history of the ›enhancement or creation of beauty by cosmetics‹ from the Renaissance to the Second World War, she also discusses much more wide-ranging questions. Does a beautiful face reflect a beautiful character? Is there a relation between beauty and desire? How is beauty, real and ideal, depicted and constructed in art and what is the connection between painting the face and fixing a likeness onto a canvas.

Reading the introduction, I was struck by a sentence I used to hear very often: ›Il faut suffrir pour être belle‹. My grandmother’s claim that you had to suffer to become beautiful has stayed with me, although she did not address it to my six-year-old self, but rather to her beloved poodle who very much disliked being groomed. While I do not think suffering is the right word for the mild pain and occasional boredom I myself might have endured seeking facial enhancement, until the end of the nineteenth century many women would have been all too aware of the truth of this old saying.

As Ribeiro shows, many of the ingredients of beautifying products were seriously harmful. The most notorious, ceruse, was made by exposing lead plates to the vapour of vinegar. Lead white was the opposite of a ›barely there‹ foundation. Particularly when mixed with mercury it created a shimmering surface but it set hard and made facial expression difficult. Despite causing black teeth, foul breath and hair loss and worse, it remained popular until the eighteenth century. The heavy metal was also used by painters, one of the many instances where the art of make-up and the art of art collide. This is also reflected in terminology: in sixteenth-century Italy a distinction was made between ›paint’, what we now might call makeup, and cosmetics, from the Greek Kosmetiké, which referred to potions used to improve the appearance of skin and hair.

During most of the periods when ceruse was used, women knew that it was

dangerous. Health concerns, however, were less important than creating a flawless complexion. Not only did it signal wealth - the owner obviously did not spend her days toiling outdoors like a farmer’s wife - clear and glowing skin also spelled out youth. Firm and rounded facial contours, bright eyes, sound teeth, rosy lips and cheeks as well as glossy hair, other signifiers of young age, consistently appear in definitions of beauty. Together with harmony, symmetry and regularity they seem to constitute Baudelaire’s ›eternal, invariable‹ elements. The above list is long but nevertheless leaves room for interpretation and Ribeiro shows how writers repeatedly tried and often failed to pin down the exact components of a beautiful face as well as their interplay. I applaud Annibale Romei who wrote in the late sixteenth century that he might not be able to describe beauty but he knew it when he saw it.

Post-punk and at a time when graphic films of cosmetic surgery gone wrong are frequently shown on TV, what women (and sometimes men) got up to in their quest for beauty does not seem quite as astonishing as it might have a few decades ago. As observed in The Ladies‹ Dictionary of 1694, toothless older women tried to defy old age with ›plumpers’, round discs of cork, leather or wax, which they held in their cheeks so that they did not ›hang like leather bags’. Black patches made of silk taffeta or velvet, sometimes cut into stars and other shapes were applied to the face to cover scars and spots in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and maybe should make a comeback. More disconcerting to us now might be certain attitudes to hygiene. When enormous chignons were fashionable in the1860s and 1870s, the The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine implored its middle-class readers to avoid buying unclean hair as it might be contaminated by ›minute insect life of a disgusting nature’.

Reading Facing Beauty and admiring the images I was most struck by the prevalence of ›artificial‹ or ›auxiliary‹ beauty before the early twentieth century, which I had wrongly assumed to be the onset of the widespread use of cosmetics. Having always been obsessed with the clothes depicted in paintings I will in future pay more attention to (female) faces, now that I know that it was not necessarily the painter who created rosy cheeks, he (it was mainly he) might have just represented the handiwork of his sitter. Expecting more instances of the condemnation of beauty aids, I was also surprised to learn how often it was praised, particularly by men.

I began to wonder about my own attempts at changing my appearance. What am I trying to achieve? Ribeiro quotes the English writer and caricaturist Max Beerbohm who believed that making oneself beautiful was a universal instinct. She also cites Jonathan Miller who wrote in his book about the representation of reflection in art that ›each individual has an idealised version of the self which they would prefer to offer to the world at large’. By using a mirror, so suggested Miller, ›this publicly visible façade can be carefully constructed’. The sociologist Rudi Laermans states something similar but goes a little further: ›powdering one’s nose, applying rouge or lipstick, blackening the eyebrows‹ is done to achieve not just ›a desired identity‹ but a ›phantasmal self-image’.

Something that is seen but has no physical reality, a phantasm, seems to describe perfectly what I see when I look in the mirror. When reading about make-up I might imagine several ›desired identities‹ I could create rather than just one ›idealised version‹ of myself. Cosmetics can aid the construction of different facades to test how I and others react to them.

They might not relate to who I think I am, rather they offer the enticing possibility of a colourful smoke screen. If this sounds as if I am some sort of wannabe Cindy Sherman fantasising about any type of appearance without regard to present notions of beauty, I have given the wrong impression. I am only to aware that my skin is supposed to be blemish-free, my lashes dark and luscious and my teeth white. I keep hoping for a transformation towards a better (looking) self and my notion of this is, of course, affected by what I see being appreciated around me. I will continue researching the perfect foundation, the exact shade of coral lipstick that would make everythingperfect, even though I might wear itonly once. Baudelaire wrote that theidea of beauty was so powerful that›man ends up looking like his idealself’, as if this would happen by chancewithout any hard work. Aileen Ribeiroshows, and most of us know, that thiswas and is hardly ever the case.

Text by Beatrice Behlen