ANCIENT DANDIES

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 272, 16 November 1929, Page 8

ANCIENT DANDIES

Recent excavations in Moorgate Street, London, have established the fact that in the city in Roman times there lived a tradesman named Lucius Julius Senis, who sold face cream in jars imported from Gaul and stamped with his own name. Ho probably also stamped on each jar the words "Made in Britain." They were very modern, these people whom we call the Ancients. The women of the patrician class kept ladies' maids whom they called Cosmetriae, whose duty it was to adorn, dress and beautify the lady of the house. Juvenal has left us an account of such, duties in his Sixth Satire. Xenophon tells us that Greeks were appointed to anount and paint Persian nobles, and Pliny mentions twentyseven different kinds of ointments and cosmetics which were used by the ladies of ancient Rome for purposes of personal adornment. He says that women painted their faces in ancient Greece because of the sedentary life which they lived. They probably worked in the. equivalent to the modern office. They not only painted their faces, but also the lips and eyebrows, and they used a special kind of blue paint to bring out the delicate veining of the temples, and thus show their blue blood. Soap was mainly lised for purposes of dyeing the hair and giving it that light colour which was so popular in Rome. The hairdressers also supplied false hair of a flaxen colour and blonde wigs. "'Ovid says that the best hair S restorers came from Germany, but sometimes they failed to restore the hair to the right colour, with amusing consequences. Cicero mentions that in Capua there was a whole street full of shops selling nothing but ointments, pomades, face paints, hair restorers and scents. The women used a rouge made from a flower which cannot be identified, and this rouge gave to the Roman matron of mature years that schoolgirl complexion, which even in the days we call B.C. was the envy of women as age advanced. Martial tells us that the Roman ladies used patches on the face just as English ladies did in the days of Queen Anne. The men mainly confined their attention to the cut and size of the toga. The largo toga became so useless for any active work that it came to be looked upon as a kind of court or evening dress. It had wide sails like Oxford bags, and we are told that Caligula made his toga so wide and so long that once, when he wanted to appear particularly dignified, he fell over it and caused laughter instead of praise. The purple hem on the toga was a mark of patrician birth and no one of plebeian origin was allowed to wear it, not even if he was a tribune. The most coveted garment was a toga entirely purple and covered with gold embroidery. The Roman dandy both male and female could have given points to many of the modern variety. The dressing table of the Roman lady with her twenty-seven ointments and her rouge and blue paint would have been the envy of many of our own younger generation. —W.M.