CRAZE FOR "MAKE-UP"

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LVI, Issue 41, 24 May 1935, Page 5

CRAZE FOR "MAKE-UP"

ONCE FASHIONABLE FOR MEN.

(From the Guardian's Special Corres-

pondent—By Air Mail)

LONDON, April 20

The craze for cosmetics—"makeup"—was almost as much a masculine as a feminine one in the eighteenth century, according to Mrs Herbert Richardson, addressing the Royal Society of Arts in London on fashionable crazes of that century.

"For sixty years beauty doctors purveyed every requisite, even to the natural and lasting blush, not to be rubbed off," she declared. Mrs Richardson quoted an advertisement of 1777, which read: "The many melancholy accidents which have lately happened in consequence of mice getting into women's -hair in the night time induced the Society of Arts, at their last meeting, to offer a premium to the person who should invent the neatest and most useful bedside mousetrap. A silver trap is now invented by Mr Moses Martingo, in New Bond street, price three guineas. He also sells nightcaps made of silver wire, as flexible as gauze, and yet so strong that no mouse or even rat can gnaw through them."

"During the Seven Years' War and other great wars of the period there were frequent advertisements of 'campaign boxes for officers, fitted with eau-de-luce, rouge, perfumed pomatum, powder-puffs, lip salve and ivory eyebrow combs'—vanity boxes, in fact, for men. Sometimes the fashionable overdid it," continued Mrs Richardson, "and between 1745 and 1760, when the craze was at its height,, at least fifteen women of fashion are supposed to have lost their lives through painting their faces and necks." /