HISTORY IN A JAR

It’s on Ella Shane’s vanity in her dressing room, and at home. Rosie the Riveter used it to take her makeup off after a long shift building airplanes. Renaissance and Regency ladies alike kept a jar. And there may well be some in your beauty kit right now.
Cold cream is so basic it’s been around practically forever.
Historians attribute the original formula to the famous second-century Greek physician Galen, who whipped up beeswax, rosewater and olive oil and got something that may have been intended as medicine – but quickly turned into a beauty standby. Even back then, the basic formula probably wasn’t really new; women have been tinkering with household basics to make beauty products as long as they’ve wanted to look and feel better. So, some unacknowledged lady may well have come up with the idea first.
The name “cold cream” comes from the cool and soothing feel on the skin, and the creamy look of the emulsion. It was a good – if somewhat heavy – moisturizer, and excellent for removing most forms of makeup. Before the late 20th century, most makeup relied on some kind of fat or oil base, and cold cream did an excellent job of dissolving it.
By the time of our Victorian ladies, of course, there wasn’t a lot of visible makeup on the street, but cold cream was still around. Ella probably got her first jar when she started performing; cold cream was a key part of the makeup kit, both as a thin layer for a base, and in larger quantities as a remover.
Cold cream was also becoming a commercial beauty product, but in somewhat different forms. The original beeswax and olive oil went rancid pretty quickly. At first, women just bought it in small amounts, but after Robert Chesebrough extracted petrolatum from petroleum in 1869, creative chemists started using petroleum jelly and mineral oils to replace the natural oils. Borax was later added as a preservative, too.
Whatever the formula, cold cream was THE basic beauty cream, and the standard by which all were measured. An early ad for “Pompeian Massage Cream” rather huffily states that it’s not a cold or grease cream, but a cream that cleanses the pores and drives away wrinkles and crow’s feet. (Can I call a taxi for mine?)
Of course, the dirty little secret is that the “Pompeian Massage Cream” probably had pretty much the same ingredient list as the more familiar cold cream. Before FDA regulations, manufacturers could, and did, say just about anything about their beauty products.
They also weren’t held to much in the way of safety standards. Part of the reason we have FDA standards for beauty products is the dangerous stuff that some companies were peddling in the name of cosmetics. You’d be more likely to run across something that just didn’t live up to the wild claims than something that would maim you – but it wasn’t impossible.
So it’s no wonder that a lot of women figured that if cold cream was good enough for Mom and Grandma, it was good enough for them, too. Some of us still do – I have a jar of rosewater cold cream that I use when my skin’s really tired and unhappy!

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