Beauty’s only skin deep. But as the humorist and playwright Jean Kerr sagely pointed out, skin deep is plenty deep enough: “What do you want: an adorable pancreas?”
In Perfection: 400 Years of Women’s Quest for Beauty, British historian Margarette Lincoln chronicles the myriad extremes that women have gone to across four centuries in pursuit of the ideal face and form (if not pancreas).
It’s not pretty. Fortunately, it’s pretty fascinating.
Drawing on diaries, letters, health-and-beauty manuals and household manuals, magazine and newspaper stories, photographs, drawings, and advertisements, Lincoln explores what it meant to be a woman in the West (generally a middle- or upper-class white woman in the West) and thus endlessly buffeted by shifting notions of what constituted good looks. But also buffeted by shifting notions about propriety as it affected beauty and body-shaping regimens.
The choices that women made about their appearance, the options that were available to them at a given time, illuminated their “position in society, their role within the family,” notes Lincoln, who covers topics such as diet and exercise, skin, hair, makeup, and hygiene. “A focus on health and beauty also illuminates a broader context of social, cultural, racial, economic and political factors.”
The male gaze was harsh. In the mid–17th century, the English government tried to outlaw “face paint,” claiming that it went against biblical precepts. Actually, the female gaze was pretty censorious, too. Ideas about beauty helped women “marginalize other women including those who were victims of colonization,” Lincoln writes. In the 19th century, white British female travelers, for example, scorned the heavy use of cosmetics by women in India and Turkey. It “helped to cement a sense of Western superiority.”
Perfection focuses on British society but includes comparisons to self-improvement trends in the United States. France also figures in Lincoln’s account because English women, whether out of insecurity, envy, disapproval, or all of the above, often looked across the Channel to see what their Parisian sisters had gotten themselves up to.
In the last decades of the 18th century, for example, it was estimated that French women went through two million pots of rouge a year. In London, this was not the thing at all. “Since blushing denoted modesty, a mask of makeup gave room for false delicacy,” writes Lincoln.
Nudes were rarely seen before the 19th century other than in the occasional religious or mythical painting, Lincoln observes in a chapter on body sculpting. Greek statuary had a big role in forming “a culturally constructed ideal body image.”
Torturous undergarments, like stays, a bodice stiffened with whalebone, metal, or wood to shape the torso and lift the bust, had a big role in amplifying that image. Wearing stays was critical for women in the 18th century, particularly in Britain. “It signaled self-control and therefore virtue as well as status.” Failure to get with the program was a sign of wantonness. Indeed, lacing up was tied to national identity, setting white British women apart from foreigners who wore “loose misshapen dress.” If an uncomfortably rigid torso was the price exacted for that sense of cultural superiority, heigh-ho.
As Perfection makes clear, suffering for beauty was the name of the game. In the southern Ireland of the late 18th century, for instance, young girls came up with an eldritch routine for obtaining a willowy frame and the then desirable pale skin. They retired each night with their bodies wrapped in tallow and brown paper. Their arms, meanwhile, were suspended and held in place by strong ropes affixed to the bed’s tester, and their feet were tied to the valance.
But some women were willing to lose more than a good night’s sleep for an admirable complexion and figure. After all, to have poor skin in the 18th and 19th centuries was to leave yourself open to disapproving observations about your late hours, your careless hygiene, and your overindulgence at the dining table.
“Skin trouble was now all about personal will, choice and moral responsibility,” writes Lincoln. To acquire that highly prized camellia-like complexion, some 18th-century English women ingested arsenic. Meanwhile, some Italian women used the juice from berries of deadly nightshade to bring a flush to their cheeks, thus risking blindness.
To be overweight was similarly judged a moral—and intellectual—failing. As women began being admitted to universities, a slender, fit body became associated with scholastic success, reinforcing links between obesity and stupidity. Smoking was one suggestion for shedding excess avoirdupois. An increase in the presence of scales for public use at railway stations and chemists helped women chart their progress. “The social reformer Beatrice Webb weighed herself each week at Charing Cross station, delighting in the loss of each half ounce,” writes Lincoln.
It’s a complicated business. While there’s no denying that women have been alternately damned for trying to enhance their appearance and damned for letting themselves go, they’re hardly passive victims of admittedly oppressive male standards of beauty. They’re ardent participants in developing and setting those standards.
No question, some Perfection readers will roll their eyes at the belief, in the 18th century, that rendered ursine fat was just the thing to strengthen hair follicles. (Really, it was perfectly logical because bears had such strong, thick coats.) Or the belief, in the late 19th century, that rough, undyed wool was the best fabric for underclothes because of its efficacy in drawing “poison” from the skin.
Scoffers, beware. These may soon be among the offerings on Goop.
Joanne Kaufman is a New York–based journalist and critic
