Ordinary people in China may have been augmenting their looks with make-up some 2000 years ago. An analysis of two residues found with a grooming kit in the tomb of a commoner from the Han dynasty hints that there was a sophisticated cosmetic industry at the time.
Ancient texts provide a wealth of records on the lives of regular people from later dynasties, including on the composition and cost of cosmetics, says Meng Wu at Shandong University in China. But little information of that type remains about commoners living 2000 years ago or earlier.
Wu and her colleagues found the make-up near the head of a woman buried in a tomb in Jinan, China, along with a mirror. She isn’t thought to have been noble because she was only buried with a few objects.
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“This discovery is very precious,” says team member also at Shandong University, noting that beauty treatments and the decaying boxes they are often found in can easily be mistaken for dirt.
Using a suite of analytical tools, the researchers investigated the chemical composition of the two powders and found hints of their ingredients. One, found beneath the mirror, was a mineral known as lead white that the team suspects was used to make skin fairer. The other, which was in a lacquer box, would have been close to the skin colour of most people living in that area and may have been used to conceal scars or blemishes.
Though it was made of cheap ingredients – animal fat, plant extracts and the silicate mineral mica – the concealer probably took a lot of work to manufacture, says Wu. The size of the mica particles, which is around the same as those of mica used in cosmetics today, suggests the mineral was ground and filtered to achieve a small and uniform size that would have stuck to skin.
“Collecting the raw materials, grinding the mica powder, refining the fat, extracting the plant and making the lacquer vessel all took a long time in an age before modern machinery,” says Wu. That suggests there was an industry dedicated to making these materials, which would otherwise have been too costly for ordinary people.
Ancient cosmetics have been found in the tombs of aristocratic men and women, but the few examples of non-elites having cosmetics that Wu knows of have all been women.
These findings provide new clues about the lives of ancient people, says at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Yang’s work has found that more expensive ingredients were used for elites’ cosmetics at the same time. From this study, it appears cosmetics were also popular with people who weren’t nobles, but who may have been wealthy, he says.
Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences
