History of powder

Despite the fact that the word "powder" came to us in Russian from German, in the original it is still of French origin. The history of the appearance of powder counts several thousand years.

The first to apply powder was the people of Ancient Egypt. In ancient times, for the Egyptians, it was extremely important to separate people according to their skin color on swarthy and light. Subsequently, for many centuries, white and even milky skin color was considered one of the main attributes of beauty and femininity. When in the sixteenth century the great painter Paolo Veronese immortalized in one of his works a noble lady with a servant, the first he painted with snow-white skin, and the face of the second made a swarthy and tanned. In those days, the bright skin and whiteness of the face emphasized social status and spoke of the noble lady belonging to servants, peasant women and other representatives of the common people burnt by the sun. Among other things, whiteness was associated with the notion of such aesthetic and refined things as pearls, snow and white lily, appearing as a symbol of purity and purity.

The history of powder knows only two main varieties of powder - mineral and vegetable. Naturally, the plant appeared much earlier and, as a rule, was made from wheat and rice, or rather from fine grinding flour. The main rule was the non-use of powder in the areas of the body in contact with each other, since its use in these places caused skin irritation.

In ancient times, the inhabitants of Egypt and Mesopotamia served powder yellow and red ocher. By the way, even now she is used by a lot of tribes from South America, Africa and Oceania. Residents of Ancient Greece powdered their faces with leaden whites, and this custom, as well as many other things they took over from the Romans, except this powdered white clay and, frightfully, excrement of the crocodile.

As reported by the Roman poet Ovid, his compatriots at a great price had diazormaty - something like a modern powder box, the contents of which were made from a mixture of wheat flour and a mixture of legumes. And thanks to Pliny the Elder, and in our time we know a couple of antique recipes for making powder. As for the eyes and eyebrows, their inhabitants of the ancient world were guided by black pencils and slips or simply by the soot of a burnt special essence. However, all these attributes of luxury were available only to noble and wealthy women, poor women and even slaves created beauty by applying masks from barley dough with egg.

Already in the seventeenth century, all segments of the population used cosmetics. And at the same time the fashion for powder is revived. On the skin it was applied, pre-mixed with the egg whites - and the thicker, the better. But in order to prevent the face from becoming like a mask, the Queen of England Elizabeth I painted barely noticeable blue blood vessels. Just at this time were in the course of the book, the pages of which were covered with light pink paint. This paper was called Spanish and tearing off the sheet, you could rub it on your cheeks. There were several reasons for rouge, powder and cover the face with whites. First, in order to hide your age. Secondly, that the complexion does not look deadly pale when the candelabra is lit. Thirdly, it should be remembered that hygiene culture, as well as medicine, were not at the high level at that time, and therefore some individual cosmetics lovers had to hide under a dense layer of make-up traces of venereal diseases and smallpox that disfigured the faces of a huge number of people of those times .

Speaking about our homeland, in Russia they started to powder under Peter I, a well-known lover of the whole Western, and finally this element of cosmetics settled in Catherine's times. Russian gentlemen and ladies used rice and wheat powder, which was tinted and flavored beforehand. Powder was so abundantly covered with a head that it was necessary to put on a hairstyle and wigs a special cover, otherwise it was impossible to protect the outfit from white pollen. The cost of powder in those days was enormous. For example, in Prussia, at the end of the eighteenth century, only 9 million of all inhabitants of this country spent about 91 million pounds of this cosmetics per year. And that's why it's absolutely not surprising that the French revolutionaries rigidly fixed the decree on powder, because wheat and rice, which the ordinary people lacked so much, were used for its manufacture. Practical for a whole century, the powder covered with a touch of oblivion, because the fashion included a healthy and natural complexion and skin. In the UK, to the ban on powder, like any other cosmetics, Queen Victoria put her hand, announcing cosmetics and everything associated with her wild vulgarity.

The new flourishing of fashion for powder was the 20th century. First, theater actresses began to actively use it, hiding the shortcomings of the skin on stage, and later in everyday life. Then in France, to the delight of all cosmetics lovers, a modern powder formula was invented, the basis of which was talc. This powder was already without harmful impurities, like lead, which caused long-term use of health problems. After only a few decades, the cosmetics industry has probably experienced more revolutions than in the long history of the powder itself. In 1932, the British company Laughton & Sons produced convenient and compact powder boxes with sponge. In the fifties, the famous Hollywood make-up artist Max Factor began to release the affordable version of the powder-base called "Pan Cake", which was accessible not only to movie stars, but also to ordinary women, effectively hiding almost all skin imperfections. One of the first, inexpensive powder began to produce Elena Rubishtein and in the early forties mass production of powder along with other cosmetics began Elizabeth Arden. By the way, at the dawn of the 20th century, under the brand High Brown, the first black powder was produced.

The appearance of powder gave people and especially women a very convenient opportunity to look at all the same regardless of the condition and therefore in the arsenal of every self-respecting representative of the fair sex there is powder or its modern counterpart.