Who Was The First Male To Wear Makeup

Makeup cosmetics such as eyeshadows, lipstick, mascara and makeup accessories on white, wooden background, top view — ©photka/Shutterstock.com

Here'due south a question for makeup users and nonusers alike: Would you believe that philosophers once determined makeup trends?

What near poets?

To empathize the origin of makeup, nosotros must travel dorsum in time about 6,000 years. We get our first glimpse of cosmetics in ancient Arab republic of egypt, where makeup served equally a marker of wealth believed to entreatment to the gods. The elaborate eyeliner feature of Egyptian art appeared on men and women every bit early every bit 4000 BCE. Kohl, rouge, white powders to lighten pare tone, and malachite eye shadow (the green colour of which represented the gods Horus and Re) were all in popular use.

Makeup is mentioned in the Bible likewise, in both the Jewish scriptures and the Christian Former Testament and New Testament. The Book of Jeremiah, which details the titular prophet's ministry from nearly 627 BCE to 586 BCE, argues against cosmetics use, thereby discouraging vanity: "And you, O desolate 1, what practise you mean that you dress in cherry-red, that you deck yourself with ornaments of gilt, that you lot enlarge your optics with paint? In vain you lot beautify yourself. Your lovers despise you lot; they seek your life." In ii Kings the evil queen Jezebel exemplifies the connection betwixt cosmetics and wickedness, being described as having "painted her eyes and adorned her head" before her expiry at the bidding of the warrior Jehu (though Jezebel'southward makeup utilize was not the impetus for her murder).

And then besides was in that location a disdain for cosmetics among ancient Romans, though not for religious reasons. Hygiene products such equally bath soaps, deodorants, and moisturizers were used by men and women, and women were encouraged to raise their natural appearance by removing body hair, merely makeup products such every bit rouge were associated with sex workers and hence were considered a sign of shamelessness. Deriding makeup users is a mutual theme in Roman poems and comic plays (though theatrical performers constituted one of the few classes of people expected to utilise cosmetics), and admonitions against makeup appear in the personal writings of Roman doctors and philosophers. The elegiac poet Sextus Propertius, for case, wrote that "looks as nature bestowed them are always almost becoming." And the philosopher Seneca the Younger, in a letter to his mother, praised the fact that she "never defiled her face with paints or cosmetics."

This Roman view of cosmetics was at least partially rooted in Stoicism, a philosophy that foregrounded moral goodness and human reason. Stoics regarded beauty equally intrinsically related to goodness. While an bonny physical course might be desirable, true "beauty" was instead associated with moral acts. Decorating the torso with cosmetics implied a vanity or selfishness that, to Stoics, was undesirable. Though Stoicism was not confined to ancient Rome—it was also prevalent among ancient Greek thinkers, some of whom shared the same ideas about makeup—in Rome information technology affected the mainstream opinion of cosmetics. Not every Roman was resistant to makeup; some people continued to rouge their cheeks, whiten their faces, and line their optics. Simply the Stoic ideal leaned toward what we today might call "no-makeup makeup"—using skin intendance products and other toiletries to enhance i's natural advent, non to decorate it.

So continued a blueprint of embracing and rejecting makeup in the Western globe. Cosmetics were so pop in the Byzantine Empire that its citizens gained an international reputation for vanity. The Renaissance era embraced all forms of physical dazzler, which people sought to attain especially through pilus dye and skin lighteners (which, containing powdered pb and other harmful products, frequently proved toxic). Another widespread movement against cosmetics appeared in the mid-19th century, when Britain's Queen Victoria declared makeup to exist vulgar, and cosmetics once more went out of manner. Though many women didn't give upward makeup entirely, many now applied it in secret: who was to say their cheeks weren't naturally rosy?

It wasn't until about the 1920s that highly visible cosmetics, such as ruddy lipstick and dark eyeliner, reentered the mainstream (at least in the Anglo-American earth; not everyone had listened to Queen Victoria and eschewed makeup in the start place). As the beauty industry gained a financial foothold, often in the course of individual women selling to other women, dissenters plant that they could no longer compete. Cosmetics, at present "productized" and advertised, again became a marking of wealth and status, and emphasizing physical features, even for sexual practice appeal, was no longer considered quite and then selfish or wicked. Eventually, advertisers persuaded women to take the opposite view: cosmetics were a necessity.

Only that's another story entirely.