I opened a Victorian beauty manual and read a line I couldn’t stop thinking about: “The fairest skins belong to the people in the earliest stage of consumption. ” They genuinely believed tuberculosis made women more beautiful—the pale skin, the flushed cheek, the feverish dewy glow. Commissioned portraits showed dying young women looking radiant, pink-lipped, angelic. And yet, at the exact same moment, respectable middle-class women were being told, constantly, often by men, that wearing makeup was an absolute no-no.
I was about to find out just how much of that “natural” Victorian beauty was a carefully constructed lie. The ideal was everywhere. Coventry Patmore’s wildly popular poem “The Angel in the House” described the perfect woman: she stayed home, never lost her temper, never shouted at the children or snapped at the servants. And angels, as everyone knew, didn’t wear makeup.
The message was simple: beauty should come from inner virtue alone, untouched by artifice. Queen Victoria herself set the tone. In her official portraits, her gowns were grand but her face looked unpainted—her nose a little red and shiny, her gaze direct. She looked like a real woman.
Like a respectable middle-class wife. On the surface, the Victorians had abandoned makeup completely. Clothes grew bigger, silkier, more restrictive, but faces became plain. Yet when I started digging through the magazines and beauty manuals of the era, I realized something extraordinary.
From around 1850 onward, there was an explosion of publications aimed at middle-class and working-class women. These magazines looked innocent enough—beauty tips, household advice, fashion plates. But open the front and back covers and the advertisements told a different story. They were all about makeup.
Send a few postage stamps and you’d receive back something that was probably rouge. A secret trade in cosmetics, hiding right there in plain sight. Historian Professor Katherine Hughes explained the stakes to me: “If you’re not pretty enough, you won’t get a husband. ” So making the best of yourself—which meant putting a huge amount of artifice into looking as natural as possible—wasn’t vanity.
It was an economic necessity. Nobody could afford to be an actual natural beauty. Everyone was secretly indulging in this covert makeup. I was determined to recreate an authentic Victorian beauty look on my model, Queenie.
Modern “natural” makeup takes me forty-five minutes and about thirty products. I suspected the Victorians’ version was just as labor-intensive, just better hidden. The Victorian beauty regime was all about skincare. I started with chamomile water—the very same infusion Queen Victoria herself used to cleanse her eyes.
Then elderflower water for the hands and face. All very floral, very pure, very wholesome. Then I moved on to cold cream, the era’s beauty staple. With pharmacist Susan Wong in her lab, I melted down white wax, added oils, and mixed in rosewater.
The result was a lovely light lotion that moisturized beautifully while leaving a subtle sheen—exactly the youthful glow Victorian ladies loved. What made it so clever was that this cream wasn’t just skincare. It was the perfect base for anything you layered on top. A seamless blended finish that made any secret makeup look completely natural.
But things got stranger from there. One of the weirdest trends of the era was the admiration for the delicate, sickly girl. Consumption was romanticized. A real beauty manual claimed the fairest skins belonged to those in the earliest stage of the disease.
The illness gave you white skin, flushed cheeks, that dewy feverish look. It was shocking then and it’s shocking now—though I suppose it’s not so different from the heroin chic of the 1990s. Fashion is cyclical, and sometimes it’s horrifying. For the colored makeup, the Victorians had to be devious.
Everything was named to sound innocent. I found recipes for “lip salve” in Victorian pharmacist books—French, German, Italian, all sounding exotic and harmless. I made the grape version: red grapes, alkanet root, beeswax, and butter. The grapes were the advertised ingredient, but it was the alkanet root—a plant dye—doing all the work.
When I tried it, the color was magnificent. A human color, almost like blood. Blended in, it looked completely natural, as if you were blushing from within. You’d never know I was wearing lipstick.
Then there was red crepe paper, the ultimate sneaky makeup tool. Any woman could walk into a stationer’s and buy it without raising suspicion. Cut a small square, dampen it, rub it on your lips, and you get just a hint of pink. Layer it under tinted lip balm and it looks even more natural—perfect for going to church, apparently.
Except for the eyes. There was no hiding those if you wanted any color on them. Why was makeup so dangerous for respectable women? I met Kate Lister, a historian of sex, to find out.
It came down to who was seen wearing it. Actresses had to wear makeup on stage, and in the mid-19th century, actresses were regarded as almost interchangeable with prostitutes. The Victorians were obsessed with prostitution—they couldn’t stop writing about it, studying it, moralizing about it. And makeup was tied tightly to that world.
Heavy makeup made you stand out, marked you as visible, as announcing to the world, “I am here. ” That wasn’t demure. That wasn’t respectable. And there was a darker consequence: the Contagious Diseases Act of 1864 allowed police in garrison towns to forcibly detain any woman suspected of being a sex worker and subject her to a genital examination.
If she refused, she could be jailed for up to a year. Women were terrified to go out alone, even without makeup, for fear of being picked up. So the challenge for any respectable woman was to achieve color without looking painted. I tried almond bloom, a liquid rouge first sold by Pears.
One drop, because as a writer of the time warned, “a violently rouged woman is one of the most disgusting objects to the eye. ” I applied it and blended. It was invisible. Absolutely undetectable.
I suspect every Victorian woman wore this. You’d be crazy not to. There was another reason for subtlety: cleanliness. An obviously made-up face was considered a dirty face.
The Victorians were fanatical about hygiene—they built sewers and public bathhouses, and soap became mass-produced, available for pennies. I visited John Gosnell & Co. , one of the era’s biggest soap producers, still around today. Their bestselling product wasn’t soap, though.
It was cherry toothpaste. Queen Victoria herself was a fan. I tried it, though I was skeptical. The paste was bright red—dyed with cochineal, made from crushed beetles.
It tasted like cuttlefish and cloves. When I brushed, my teeth turned bright red. My gums looked like I had gum disease. My tongue was rosy.
It certainly told you you’d brushed. And underneath the ad for the toothpaste, in the same illustrated paper, was an ad for false teeth at one pound a set. You had your choice. Gosnell’s built an empire on that toothpaste, expanding into perfumes, face creams, and powders.
For a culture that preached the natural look, an awful lot of people were making money selling cosmetics. Then there was Madame Rachel. She ran a salon on Bond Street and was one of the most notorious figures of Victorian beauty. She sold full-on cosmetics—rouge, lipstick—no pretense of soap and fragrance.
Her marketing was aggressive. One of her adverts read: “How frequently we find that a slight blemish on the face, otherwise divinely beautiful, has occasioned a sad and solitary life of celibacy, unloved, unblessed, and ultimately unwed and unremembered. ” She preyed on women’s deepest insecurities. The Times wrote scores of articles about her.
She ended up in prison for fraud. And once again, cosmetics were tied to crime, gossip, and a fall from respectability. Madame Rachel also offered a treatment called enameling—a complete counter-trend to the natural look. It was heavy makeup, almost like an Instagram filter, designed to fill in wrinkles and make you look decades younger.
It was expensive—thousands of pounds in today’s money—and it was utterly hush-hush. Like cosmetic surgery today, you wouldn’t advertise having had it done. The most famous example was Virginie Gautreau, known as Madame X, immortalized by John Singer Sargent. In the painting, she looks almost like a pearl—white, luminous, and you can see her real skin texture around her eyes and ears.
Her ears weren’t painted. I recreated an enamel recipe from 1868, which used bismuth and nitric acid to produce a pearlescent white pigment. It was definitely a lot safer than lead, and bismuth is still used in cosmetics today for that pearly glow. When I applied it, I could see how it would work—but it wasn’t something to test on Queenie’s fresh-faced look.
So I tried it on myself. I layered on the white paste, added red lipstick and blush, and painted fake blue veins with the “blue vein pencil. ” I looked like a ghost with veins drawn on my face. It was unsettling.
In daylight, this would look terrible. And the sheer amount of makeup involved—even extreme by today’s standards—was part of a culture that preached only natural beauty was acceptable. Only the very young and lucky could have that naturally perfect look. For everyone else, science and marketing stepped in to fake it.
And God forbid you got caught using any of it. Books were full of cautionary tales about pearl white makeup. The most famous story involved a young woman at a chemistry lecture. A bottle of Harrogate water—therapeutic mineral water, very popular—was passed around.
It smelled like rotten eggs because it contained hydrogen sulfide. The woman took a sniff, and her makeup reacted with the sulfur. Right there, in front of everyone, her face turned suddenly black. She was exposed as a fraud, humiliated, and taught a lesson: rely on inner beauty, not artificial enhancement.
Of course, the real lesson was that makeup was a dangerous secret, and the risk of exposure was catastrophic. For the eyes, the Victorians used sneaky tricks. I applied castor oil to Queenie’s brows to condition them and give a glossy, healthy look. For the lashes, I mixed castor oil with coal dust—sneaky mascara.
It worked wonderfully, but the risk was obvious: if you got caught in the rain, black streaks would run down your face. In England, that was a likely fate. Mascara did exist, too—it was called “mascaro” and was actually a theatrical product made of soap and black dye, originally used by men to tint gray beards. If a woman wanted to use it, she’d have to steal it from her husband.
Men weren’t exempt from the pressure to look natural. At the start of the Victorian era, most men were clean-shaven. Then came the Crimean War in the 1850s, and soldiers returned home with huge beards they hadn’t been able to shave. Suddenly beards became the symbol of the hero, the macho man.
They stayed fashionable for most of the rest of the century. Military moustaches became so important that it was legally mandated for British soldiers to wear them. Men who couldn’t grow proper facial hair were in trouble—there was a thriving trade in illegal fake moustaches. And there was a huge prejudice against red hair.
Redheads, both men and women, faced vicious discrimination. Pale blonde hair was admired by scholars, and a scientist claimed his statistical study proved English gentlemen preferred brunettes for marriage. But if you were prematurely gray, the Victorians had a solution for that, too. Hair dye had existed since ancient times, but the Victorians used new chemicals developed for photography.
I had Neil Brazier, a chemist, recreate an authentic two-part dye. The first step was wetting the hair in gallic acid and letting it dry. Then we sponged on a silver ammonia solution. Under strong light, the silver developed into a black color.
The result was intense—essentially black or blacker. Many men dyed their beards this way and ended up looking quite scary. Apparently, in 1861, there was a traveling photographer who took family portraits by day and, as a sideline in the evenings, used his leftover chemicals to dye beards and moustaches. Entrepreneurial, to say the least.
When we tested it, the result was actually more natural than I expected—not as black, not matte. An acceptable gray solution. Finally, it was time to put the finishing touches on Queenie. I had used chamomile water, cold cream, powder, almond bloom blush, the grape lip salve, castor oil, and coal dust.
It had taken a huge amount of time and effort to produce something so subtle you could hardly see it. That was the point. The perfect natural look. I stood back and admired the result.
Queenie looked virtuous, good, naturally beautiful. The Victorian makeup suited her perfectly. But the more I’d learned, the less innocent it seemed. The Victorian obsession with natural beauty was a narrow, unforgiving standard.
The condition of your skin was treated as proof of your inner worth. And that belief drove an entire culture of trickery, secrets, and lies. All that artifice in service of appearing to have none.
I’ll take a full face of honest makeup any day.
