Today is International Lipstick Day — one of the oldest cosmetic products. The earliest records of its use take us back 5,000 years! Lipstick was also known in Ancient Egypt.
Our collection contains rather rare examples of Russian 'packaging and storage' of cosmetics from the 17th century. Over the years, excavations on the territory of the Sloboda have uncovered a ceramic lipstick jar and a bone perfumer's spoon used to apply the pigment. The piece is decorated with carving on the handle: engraved circles with a dot in the center, the end is beveled, with three 'teeth'. By the way, later they also found a bone kopoushka — a small spatula for cleaning ears. Neat Russian beauties even wove it into their braids so that such a necessary item was always at hand. Samples of the lipstick jar, the perfumer's spoon and the kopoushka can be seen at our new exhibition 'Terra Incognita. Russia of the 16th century through the eyes of foreigners'
- said Elena Zhilkina, chief curator of the Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda museum-reserve.
In general, in the 15th–16th centuries cosmetics became a common commodity — in Moscow they could easily be bought in special whitening stalls. Pale skin was fashionable, so women used white makeup, often lead-based; rouge with added cinnabar and poisonous antimony for the eyebrows were also used. Penetrating the skin, this poison accumulated in the body. Less affluent Russian fashionistas used natural products, which in fact preserved their health. For rouge and lipstick they used raspberry or cherry juice, rubbed their cheeks with beetroot and sundew leaves, powdered themselves with flour, and drew eyebrows with coal and charred cork.
Europeans harshly criticized the fairer half of Russia. The English physician Samuel Collins, who lived here for nine years as a court doctor, published at home in 1671 his notes 'The Present State of Russia, laid down in a Letter to a Friend Living in London.' In them he remarks:
'They consider plumpness the beauty of a woman. Their rouge resembles the paints with which we decorate the pipes of our houses in summer and which consist of red ochre and Spanish white. Here they like low foreheads and elongated eyes and therefore bind their headdresses so tightly that afterwards they cannot raise their hands and heads.' And the well-known traveler, the German scholar Adam Olearius, in the same 17th century wrote about the Russian 'enchantresses': 'Women of medium height, generally well-formed, delicate in face and body. But in the cities they all rouge and whitewash themselves, and so coarsely and noticeably that it seems as if someone had run a handful of flour over their faces and painted their cheeks red with a brush. They blacken, and sometimes dye their eyebrows and eyelashes brown'
Over the past centuries, fashion and attitudes toward the amount of cosmetics on the face have undergone significant changes, but lipstick has not lost its popularity; it has only gained additional facets of variety: alongside the traditional kind, hygienic lipstick and lip gloss have appeared. So let's celebrate this holiday today together by buying another tube of this cosmetic product so beloved by women of all ages!
