BLAME IT ON BERNHARDT

Women have been looking for ways to redden their lips since the first cave woman realized her berry snack had a side benefit. Ancient ladies from Greece to Egypt always had a pot of some kind of lip-salve, and it often had a red coloring, whether from fruit, flowers – or even crushed minerals.
The recipes didn’t really change much over the next couple of millennia. It was usually a heavy oil or tallow preparation – or maybe beeswax and some kind of flower water, but the idea remained the same: a schmear of something to soften the lips and add a bit of color.
During the Renaissance, it was more than a bit of color. With the flamboyant makeup styles of the time (white-lead and egg-white foundation – no kidding!) a vermilion lip was part of the look. And sometimes it really WAS a vermilion lip – colored with the same dangerous mercury-sulfide used in paint!
Heavy makeup was definitely out by the nineteenth century, first thanks to the light and natural styles after the French Revolution, and then tangled up with the Victorians’ ideas of artless maidenly purity. By the late 19th century, a “good woman” would definitely have a pot of tinted lip salve on her vanity…but it would be a light tint, and she’d never put it on in public.
Well, until Sarah Bernhardt, anyhow.
The great actress, like all performers, wore greasepaint onstage. But she liked the look of a red lip and started wearing it offstage. Since she wasn’t exactly a shrinking violet, she soon decided that she’d touch it up wherever and whenever she liked.
It would take a few decades for ordinary women to get comfortable with the idea of public touch-ups, but by the turn of the 20th century, most ladies had no problem with going out with a noticeably reddened lip. And many would have rouge in their bags for a private fix.
That rouge, by the way, was usually in a pot or vial.
Chemists certainly knew how to make a lipstick by then; pomades, perfumes and other things were sold in stick form from the mid-1800s. And there definitely were colored lip-salves available as sticks by the 1890s, though it seems they were being sold as theatrical makeup.
A lady’s rouge, though, was usually a little pot on her dressing table, or packed into a fancy “vanity case,” in her purse, often with rice powder for her face, a mirror, and maybe other small implements. Lipstick may seem more useful to us – it’s what we’re used to -- but cream rouge was very practical, an easily portable way to have lip and cheek color in one little pot.
Lipstick as such didn’t really catch on until the 1910s…and then with a vengeance! Makeup cases were redesigned to include lipsticks – sometimes in the hinge, a style we sometimes still see today, and lipstick became the main form of lip color. So much so that “lipstick” replaced “rouge” as the generic word for lip color.
Ella Shane, by the way, has a nice little pot of rosepetal lip-salve on her vanity. And as much as she admires Miss Bernhardt, she’s far too much of an old-fashioned lady to take it outside!
Next week – part two of our look at lipstick – with a deep dive into color trends from Queen Elizabeth I to Taylor Swift.

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