Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was the ultimate influencer of her day, and her makeup was anything but subtle. Her cheeks blazed with rouge, her lips were painted a perfect pink, and her hair towered in an enormous, feathered creation. The look was a loud proclamation of wealth in a world where half the country’s land belonged to just a few hundred families. To be rich wasn’t enough—you had to look it.
I was recreating that look on Queenie, who normally wears no makeup at all. We started with a modern, high-fashion version of the era’s bold aesthetic: strong, colorful, and impossible to ignore. That painterly look was the goal. At Chatsworth House, I traced the origin of that style back to Georgiana herself.
Her personal hairdresser earned double the coachman’s salary. That’s how important looking the part was. If you wanted to marry up, you had to already look like you belonged. The centerpiece of the Georgian face was white skin.
The most popular product, ceruse, was made with lead. By then, people knew lead was poison. It could cause infertility, deafness, and death. Still, they wore it every day, because non-toxic alternatives made from chalk or flour simply couldn’t match that pure, white glow.
I had a modern pharmacist recreate the genuine lead recipe. Next to a safe version, it was starkly different. It was more opaque, more brilliant. In candlelight, the lead version gave off a beautiful, ethereal glow while the others looked gray and greasy.
It was beauty at the cost of health—a trade people made then, and still do now. Some paid the ultimate price. The Gunning sisters rose from humble backgrounds to marry a duke and an earl. But Maria, obsessed with her status, reportedly became addicted to ceruse.
She was dead by 28. The gossip was that her makeup killed her. Then came the rouge. I made it using a recipe from the time, mixing cochineal from dried beetles and brazilwood with vinegar to create a fiery red.
I soaked it into strips of Spanish wool, sold for creating the perfect painted cheek. Queenie got her blush in two styles: the heavy Marie Antoinette circles for one cheek, the subtler English flush for the other. Then I lined her brows with burnt cloves, which worked beautifully. But the era’s white faces carry a deeper shadow.
I spoke with an art historian about how this beauty ideal contrasted with black lives in Georgian Britain. Most black people faced extreme prejudice, but a few portraits reveal individuals like Dido Belle and Francis Barber, dressed and posed in the same aristocratic style, showing their membership in an elite class. They were rare exceptions. The Georgians took their look to extremes, and satirists mocked them ruthlessly.
The most brutal cartoons showed society beauties in stages of transformation, stripping away wigs, teeth, and rouged cheeks to reveal an old hag underneath. The warning was clear: makeup was deception. To finish Queenie’s look, I used rouge on her lips, applied a beauty patch on her left cheek—a signal that she was unmarried—and completed the transformation. She had become a Georgian lady of leisure.
But this opulent style had a short future. In 1789, revolution broke out in France. As Marie Antoinette lost her head, dramatic displays of wealth became not just unfashionable but dangerous. Britain turned to a new ideal: sensible, practical, pared back.
The bold, painted face wouldn’t return until the 20th century.
