HISTORY OF COSMETICS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21807, 23 May 1934, Page 4

HISTORY OF COSMETICS

ancient origin The precise origin of cosmetics in unknown, but its history can be traced back through the centuries until it passes out of the Christian calendar into the eons of time preceding the foundation of the Roman Ekjipire, and the rise and fall of tho Egyptian dynasty, back into the dim days before the ancient prophets. And still the cosmetic thread is faintly visible weaving its way through the twilight ages to pass beyond the days of Atlantis a period conjectured to anti-date the Christian era by 23,000 years—and so into the eternal midnight of unrecorded history. Somewhere there lies buried tho origin of cosmetics. Thousands of years before the birth of Christ, when the centre of civilisation stood on the sun-baked banks of the sacred Nile, we find, as was revealed nt the opening of Tutankhamen's tomb at Luxor, an astonishing collection of highly refined cosmetics, constituting a part of the toilet equipment of Egyptian women. It might thus well and reasonably be conjectured that centuries later the glorious and ravishing beauty of Queen Cleopatra enlisted the aid of the make-up box to enslave the hapless Mark Antony, and so bring about his ruinous contention with Caesar Augustus. Tho flight of Antony and Cleopatra and their ultimate fate virtually brought into being the first real consolidation of that great historic entity—the Roman Empire. And so we are left to contemplate the fantastic, though feasible, theory of the cosmetic cause of the first great Western civilisation! And the fragrant paints and powders might even more easily be associated with the social frivolities and abandonment that undermined and finally precipitated the downfall of the mighty Caesars.