Pepys's Patches

Not Poetry, Poetics, or Portland, but help me out people with a little Pepys. In his diary entry for 14 May 1660, he notes Dutch ladies of fashion wearing "black patches." By August, he's pleased to see his wife with them; in November he writes:

"The Princess Henrietta is very pretty, but much below my expectation; and her dressing of herself with her hair frizzed short up to her ears, did make her seem so much the less to me. But my wife standing near her with two or three black patches on, and