The late eighteenth century belonged to the peacocks of British fashion, the high Georgians. I love this look. It is so painterly, so delicious in its color palette. Look at this lady’s cheeks, that wonderful shade of coral, and the contrast between her white powdered wig and her black eyebrows.
It is a deeply dramatic look. And it wasn’t just for women. This fellow is telling us he is hot. He has gone heavy with the rouge, not only on his cheeks but on his lips, on his eyelids, even in his hair.
The lipstick is just out there. He is going for it. These wealthy Georgians used their appearance to show off just how rich they were. And that fits the age.
The eighteenth century was a period of massive ostentation matched by staggering inequality. It ended in parts of Europe with bloodshed and revolution. But for the Georgians, bling was in. To recreate this look, I needed a model.
Queenie agreed to help. She normally wears no makeup at all, so she was in for a big surprise. Georgian makeup is really about ostentation and showing off, so I thought we would start with a modern equivalent, the kind of strong, colorful, bold makeup I do for a high-fashion shoot or a runway show. Very noticeable.
Queenie was up for it. There are few better places to explore the elegance and extravagance of Georgian glamour than Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. I came here to seek out one of the great beauties of the day. In the late eighteenth century, the rich were getting richer.
Half the productive land in the country was in the hands of just three hundred and ten titled families, and did they love to flaunt their wealth. Art, houses, entertaining, and of course, clothes and hair. In the 1770s, Chatsworth was home to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. I am so in love with this portrait of her by Gainsborough.
Having your portrait painted by Gainsborough was the equivalent, in the twentieth century, of having David Bailey take your family picture. Georgiana was in her late twenties here, at the height of her celebrity and her influence. And the beauty look is divine. The blushed cheeks, the perfect pink lip color, and the hair is enormous.
Not just high, but wide, and set so far back. I cannot imagine having that much hair on my head. Along with the hat and the feathers, I keep thinking of Dolly Parton’s quote: the higher the hair, the closer to God. In Georgian society, you couldn’t just be rich.
You had to look rich. And the wealthier you were, the more extreme you could take your look. Historian Hannah Wallace pulled documents from the Chatsworth archives to show me just how important creating the right look was to Georgiana. I work on big fashion shoots, and I know it takes an army and hours upon hours to create those big hairdos.
Who did Georgiana have on staff? She certainly had a team of servants. The account books show she had a ladies’ maid, a chambermaid, and most importantly, her own personal hairdresser. He was paid more than any of the women, including the housekeeper.
Here he is, Gilbert, earning fifty-two pounds ten shillings a year. That is a huge sum, far more than the coachman on forty pounds and more than the butler. Gilbert earned the equivalent of about a hundred thousand pounds a year, and he got the same again in travel expenses. You get a real sense of how important hair was to Georgiana.
Gilbert was French, and that would have been a huge draw. The French court was influencing fashions at the time. In this letter from 1774, one of Georgiana’s friends in the French court drew the latest style, with the hair placed large on the head. Georgiana took that inspiration and made it her own.
She made the towers even taller and added ostrich feathers on top. The hair just kept getting bigger and bigger. It became a race. Whenever you saw an image of another lady with a bigger headdress, you had to go bigger.
Hannah also showed me a lock of Georgiana’s actual hair. It was a beautiful golden brown, the kind of color you ask your colorist to do for you today. She would have worn hair powder over it until she died. The hair powder named after her was called Devonshire Brown.
That’s the color I want now. It was time to start Queenie’s Georgian look. My area of expertise is the face, but inspired by Georgiana, we clearly needed to start with the hair. I asked hairdresser Carol Robinson to help.
There is nothing casual about high Georgian hair. It is enormous. To make the look as authentic as possible, we sought inspiration from fashion plates hot off the press from 1781, and I asked Carol to use only period products and techniques. She started with the grease, a little animal fat and lavender.
Hair grease was known as pomade and was used to mold the hair. It actually smelled really nice, thank goodness, because they apparently also used bear grease. The other must-have hair product was powder. Powder was originally used to stop hairdos from becoming smelly and greasy, since hair washing was not a daily habit.
It was also supposed to keep away head lice. But it evolved into a fashionable part of the look, with pastel-colored powders particularly popular. Carol used wheat starch as powder, layering it onto the hair with pomade to create bulk and set it. It was the Georgian equivalent of hairspray and mousse.
Realistically, this would have taken hours. Layer upon layer of grease and powder was just the prep work. After that came the structure. Lots of padding, lots of bits of coarse fake hair that helped hold the real hair and add height.
Carol promised we were going to double that height. Hairstyles like this were incredibly time consuming, and that was the point. An elaborate hairstyle showed you had the time and the staff to do it. In fact, the very act of doing your toilet and makeup became a public performance.
One woman who knew this more than most was Marie Antoinette, Queen of France. She once wrote, I put on my rouge and wash my hands in front of the whole world. It was an honor and a privilege to be invited to the Queen’s toilet. First, a very trusted lady-in-waiting would help her out of bed and get the first layer of makeup on.
Then more and more important people would arrive to watch. The closest modern comparison is making a behind-the-scenes video, where you get the model almost ready and then invite the cameras in for the final tweaks. It was a performance. In Georgian times, makeup was such an important symbol of wealth and status that in 1764, Queen Charlotte was painted in front of her dressing table.
It was seen as a fitting backdrop for the highest-status lady in the country. Throughout history, perfect smooth skin has been a constant signifier of health, vitality, youth, and fertility. Today we have an ever-growing army of lotions and potions promising perfection. Good makeup still starts with good skin care.
In the eighteenth century, it was particularly important. Increased consumption of alcohol and sugar took a toll on the complexion, and diseases like smallpox left many people scarred. The importance of a good skin care regime is illustrated in an eighteenth-century recipe book, The Toilet of Flora. It promised cosmetics of every kind that could smooth and brighten the skin, give force to beauty, and take off the appearance of old age and decay.
The book is full of strange and wonderful things. My favorite recipe involved putting myrrh on a shovel, heating it in the fire until boiling hot, glugging back white wine, spitting the wine onto the shovel, and placing your face immediately over it. The steam was meant to melt away wrinkles. Can you imagine?
Third-degree burns and a waste of wine. Luckily, there were less dangerous-sounding recipes. I decided to make an everyday cleanser called common wash balls. I grated olive oil soap, added brandy, then eight drops of lemon fragrance.
I added starch to help with shaping. There is so much in common with modern cosmetics. We still use various alcohols, fragrances, waxes, starches, and water. The mixture took on a lovely rosy hue.
The wash balls needed a couple of hours to dry out. Traditionally, they were made at home, with family recipes passed down through generations. But in the eighteenth century, making cosmetics became more commercialized. New exotic spices and scents arrived thanks to the expansion in global trade.
If you had cash to spend, you might buy figured wash balls, made with exotic ingredients like coffee or rose petals, with layers of colored soap cut into intricate shapes on the inside. I peeled one open to find beautiful yellow stars. If you had the money, you would definitely have invested in one of those. When I finished my wash balls, I was excited to see what Carol had done with Queenie’s hair.
It looked amazing. Queenie said it felt really heavy, and walking around made her feel powerful, regal, but also like she couldn’t fit through doors anymore. In those days, women sometimes had to sit on the floor of their carriages because their hair would not fit on the seats. When you cannot even sit in your own carriage, things have gone a bit too far.
Now for the makeup. There was one aspect of the Georgian look that was particularly attention-grabbing. Before trying it on Queenie, I wanted to try it on myself. The Georgians enhanced their makeup with accents of jet black, most notably in the shape of patches.
Patches could be made of taffeta, velvet, or any kind of cloth. They were the perfect concealer of the day. If you had a blemish, a spot, or a mark from disease, you could just pop one on. They also had a secret language.
A heart on the right cheek meant you were married. A heart on the left cheek meant you were available. They could also signify political leanings. I made a crescent moon.
They could be stars or moons or any shape. They were soaked in gum arabic, so you could wet them before applying. A patch close to the eye told the world you were passionate and possibly a mistress. It was tempting to go over the top, and the excesses of the Georgian look were easy prey for cartoonists.
The late eighteenth century was a golden age of satire, and overdressed men and women often featured. The cartoonists also loved to poke fun at eyebrows, which needed to be black and thick to contrast against the white face makeup. I got hold of some mouse-hide brows, which apparently were a thing. They were hideous.
Horrendous. It was like the sharpie brow all over again. I could not bear to look at myself in them. Luckily, there was a more natural-looking alternative that the Georgians also favored.
Burnt cloves. Clothes could be burned with candle flame and used as an eyebrow pencil. I put the round edge into a flame to create charcoal. The color was great, not too harsh, with a nice soft effect.
It was as effective as any modern eyebrow pencil, a really flattering way to achieve a strong statement brow without looking harsh. I will definitely be using cloves on Queenie. Not so much the mouse brows. Getting a look right can be a minefield, and some amazing sources from the time show that the Georgians were every bit as judgmental as we are today.
I came to Chiswick House in West London, another home of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, to meet historian Emily Brand. She showed me a great eighteenth-century source, the Scales of Beauty, from the Gentleman of Pleasure’s Pocket Book. It was essentially a list ranking women with a point-scoring system based on beauty, elegance, and grace. At the top was the Duchess of Devonshire, with a brilliant forty-two out of fifty for beauty.
On grace and elegance, she was trouncing almost everyone else. Poor Mrs. Jones scored only twelve for beauty, six for grace, and four for elegance. It was a bit embarrassing for her to be included at all.
It reminded me of men’s magazines from the nineties that used to rate people on the cover. There was an equivalent scale for men, but interestingly, they were not judged on beauty. They were judged on talents, knowledge, wit, and conversation. A real gender divide.
What mattered most, especially for the aristocracy, was status. Being at the top of the hierarchy meant being beautiful and elegant. It brought a power dynamic into play. And this was a time of change.
Britain was in an economic boom, with new families and new money hoping to marry up into the aristocracy. For a Georgian woman determined to marry up, your best shot was to look like you already belonged there. And at that time, in the very narrow, restrictive definition of beauty, nothing said aristocratic more than a painted white face. White makeup had been fashionable for centuries.
For Tudors like Elizabeth I, it was a symbol of wealth, showing that they had never had to work outside. It also covered signs of aging or ill health. The most popular white makeup was known as ceruse, made with white lead pigment. By the eighteenth century, it was common knowledge that lead was poisonous, and yet people kept using it.
I wanted to know what made lead ceruse so desirable. You cannot buy it today, so I got help from the University of Keele. Pharmacist Dr. Sue Chan Wong made me a genuine Georgian ceruse.
Lead is a poisonous metal that can be processed to form a white pigment, the active ingredient in ceruse. It can be absorbed through the skin, cause infertility in women, and with prolonged use, lead to deafness and eventually death. The thought of people putting it all over their faces, necks, and bodies day after day is horrifying. And what is worse, they knew it by then.
They still risked using it. Sue followed a recipe mixing lead carbonate with beeswax and oil. Lead carbonate is more commonly known as flake white, prized by artists for brilliant white highlights. Because it is so poisonous, today it is only used for art restoration.
Sue used it carefully in a controlled environment. The color was pure white, very creamy, with a lovely dewy glow. It was beauty over health again. But of course, eighteenth-century beauties did not parade around in brightly lit labs.
This look was intended to be seen in softer light. I compared Sue’s lead ceruse with a safe, non-toxic version made from another period recipe, using French chalk and beeswax, or sometimes talc, flour, or even bones. The non-toxic version was shiny, liquidy, smooth, and a bit greasy. The lead version was completely different.
Much more opaque, a much purer white. It made the non-toxic version look gray. It looked like clown paint to us now, but men and women wore this in the evening, seen by candlelight. In candlelight, the lead ceruse had a slight sheen, a beautiful ethereal glow.
The non-toxic version looked gray and way too shiny. We look back and think that was crazy. They looked good but risked their lives. But is it that different from today?
We all do things we know are not great for our health in the name of beauty. It still happens. Now that I had seen what genuine ceruse looked like, I knew how to replicate that eighteenth-century ethereal glow with modern makeup. Time to get Queenie whitened up.
It was definitely very pale, and it was going to get paler. The perfect Georgian look is hard to get right, and just like today, the public displayed a certain glee when a celebrity’s beauty mishaps led to disaster. A tragic example is the Gunning sisters, a pair of beauties who were the Kardashians of their day. Maria and Elizabeth Gunning came from a relatively humble background, but their great beauty gave them a ticket into high society.
At balls and soirées, they sparkled and attracted crowds. When they traveled, people hired out rooms in hotels so they could hang out of the windows and catch a glimpse of the sisters going into their carriages. Their beauty allowed them to bag a duke and an earl, earning titles of their own. High society disapproved, feeling the sisters had stolen two of the nation’s most eligible bachelors.
The lengths Maria was prepared to go to in order to stay in these elite circles became a cautionary tale. It was rumored she was addicted to lead ceruse and would not be seen without it. She fell ill at about twenty-six or twenty-seven and died just after her twenty-eighth birthday. The gossip was that she had been killed by white lead, by her cosmetics.
She just could not face the world without it. She got roped into it, and it was tied to her reputation and personal vanity. Maria was a victim not only of her own vanity, but of a society where beauty was one of the only ways a woman could make her way in the world. Looking at the grandeur of these rooms, it is not surprising that men and women felt compelled to use the transformative power of hair and makeup to help them make an entrance.
Imagine coming to a ball here. The beautiful dresses rustling, diamond necklaces gleaming in the candlelight. It was a very competitive environment. Wearing your hair a little bit higher and your complexion a little more dramatic would help you get noticed.
Was it worth using poisonous cosmetics for? Some people thought so. Achieving a perfect alabaster face was the most important step of the Georgian look. But without any other color, it would drain the life out of you.
Part of the trick to show you were a proper lady was a tendency to blush. And still today, there is nothing like a well-blushed cheek. The recipe books from the time offered plenty of formulas for rouge. I made one using two natural dyes, cochineal, derived from dried beetles, and brazilwood.
I ground them up to release the pigment, mixed them with vinegar, poured the mixture into a pan, and heated it. The color was a vibrant orangey red, a real firecracker, almost like chili. You would have to go sparingly with it, but not the Georgians. More is more.
Red pigment is the oldest makeup in existence. The ancient Egyptians mixed it with animal fat to tint the skin, and ancient Greek texts reference women applying rouge to create a youthful flush, much as we do today. When the mixture was done, I sieved it into a bowl and tore off a strip of Spanish wool, soaked it in the mixture, and left it to dry. This was how you could have portable rouge, and it was actually how you would buy it from the pharmacy.
I applied some to myself. To get the authentic Georgian look, I applied white makeup first, then the Spanish wool, wetted. On one cheek, I applied it Marie Antoinette style, in a huge precise circle in a color not far from scarlet. On the other cheek, I applied it in a more English style, subtle and good.
England versus France. I was very happy with my Georgian rouge. I was loving doing makeup with these authentic formulas. It was fascinating to see how they behaved and how the effects in the paintings were achieved.
But while I was enjoying experimenting with this look, built entirely around artificially whitened faces, I was acutely aware that so much of the wealth and splendor of Georgian Britain was generated by the transatlantic slave trade, trafficking tens of millions of people from Africa to the New World. I discussed this with art historian Steve Martin. If you research beauty ideals in Britain at this period, it is a bit like Groundhog Day. Constant references to white porcelain skin and pink cheeks.
But attitudes to black beauty were surprisingly various. While you had this very pale, powdered, primped image, particularly of white women, you also saw for the first time representations of black men and women as individuals, not just contrasted with white social superiors. There is Dido Belle, the great-niece of Lord Mansfield, depicted side by side with her cousin Elizabeth. Although she is clearly a beautiful young woman, the point is still made to emphasize her blackness.
She is pointing at her cheek. The statuses are still delineated, but it is interesting to see these two cousins as equals. There is also a beautiful painting of a very handsome young man, Francis Barber. His hair is arranged in a very Europeanized style, but there is a nobility and strength to his expression.
Barber is one of a number of black people from this period immortalized in paint, but only a select few. They are very much the exception, a telling contrast to the realities of the majority of black lives in Britain during this period, where racial prejudice was extreme. But these portraits show that a few transcended the class divide. They had black skin, but shared the hairstyles, fine clothing, and stance of white Georgian aristocrats.
The trappings of beauty showed membership in an elite club. And the look I was doing on Queenie was all about showing she belonged to this wealthy set. For Queenie’s brows, I had a treat for her. I asked how she felt about a mouse brow.
It was very authentic, made of mouse hide, but we were not sure the Georgians actually wore them, and it would kill the whole look. So we definitely were not going with those. Instead, I used burnt clove. It was beautiful, so easy to blend.
It was such a good way of doing brows. They were onto something. Mouse brows may be no more than a myth, but they were definitely joked about as an example of how excessive the aristocratic beauty look could be. The cruelest satirical print of the time was called Six Stages of Mending a Face, depicting Lady Archer, a bit of a party girl who liked gambling.
The artist drew her completely bald, turned into an old hag, putting on an enormous wig, then her eye makeup, her breasts sagging, then putting in teeth, applying rouge, and finally showing what they would have considered a very attractive woman. The message was that makeup and hair are deceptive. It was almost a warning to men: if you think this is what you are marrying, actually it might be this. Time for the finishing touches on Queenie.
We already gave her a hairdo that made her seven feet tall. Now I wanted to add some playfulness of the macaroni look, but aiming more for a Gainsborough than a caricature. I used the rouge for lips, just as the Georgians did. I was used to modern professional makeup, but it was amazing how effective these simple Georgian recipes and techniques were.
The blush was fantastic, much more natural-looking and blendable than I expected. Applying it with the Spanish wool was pretty effective. I absolutely loved the effect of the burnt cloves on the brow. Period products could be tricky, but building slowly created a very beautiful painterly effect.
The final touch was a patch. A heart. I asked Queenie if she was married. No.
In that case, she would have it on her left cheek. Finally, we were done. I had turned Queenie from one person into another. In the Georgian era, this is what power looked like.
A beauty look that only huge amounts of time and money could buy. Painted white skin and products made with expensive, exclusive ingredients. And with hair this high, there was nothing much you could do but be on display. The ultimate lady of leisure.
Seeing the Georgian look on Queenie showed what an incredible insight makeup gives us into an era. By the end of the eighteenth century, the decadence of this look came to represent all that was wrong with this unequal society. In 1789, France was convulsed by revolution, and the shockwaves were felt in Britain. It is no coincidence that as Marie Antoinette lost her head at the guillotine, excessive displays of wealth became not just unfashionable, but dangerous.
Britain wanted a new kind of beauty. Sensible, practical, paired back. There would not be a makeup look as bold again until the twentieth century.
