At Home - Bill Bryson [208]
Women’s hair became so complicated that it took on a whole new vocabulary; even individual curls or sections of curls had names—frivolité, des migraines, l’insurgent, monte la haut, sorti, frelange, flandon, burgoigne, choux, crouche, berger, confident, and many more. (Chignon, for a knot at the back of the head, is about the only word that survives from this once-extensive vocabulary.) Because of the amount of work involved, it was not uncommon for women to leave their hair untouched for months on end, except to add a little paste from time to time to keep everything cemented in place. Many slept with their necks on special wooden blocks to keep their hairstyles elevated and undisturbed. One consequence of failing to wash was that their hair often swarmed with insects, particularly weevils. One woman reportedly miscarried when she discovered that mice were nesting in her upper decks.
Extreme hair: Miss Prattle Consulting Doctor Double Fee About Her Pantheon Head Dress (photo credit 17.1)
The heyday of the towering hairstyles for women was the 1790s, when men were already giving up wigs. Generally women’s wigs were festooned with ribbons and feathers, but sometimes with even more elaborate devices. John Woodforde, in his History of Vanity, mentions a woman who had a model ship, complete with sails and cannon, riding the waves of her headwear, as if protecting it from invasion.
In the same period it became fashionable to wear artificial moles, known as mouches. Gradually these artificial patches took on shapes, like stars or crescent moons, which were worn on the face, neck, and shoulders. One lady is recorded as sporting a coach and six horses galloping across her cheeks. At the peak of the fashion, people wore a superabundance of mouches until they must have looked rather as if they were covered in flies. Patches were worn by men as well as women, and were said to reflect one’s political leanings by whether they were worn on the right cheek (Whigs) or left cheek (Tories). Similarly, a heart on the right cheek signaled that the wearer was married, and on the left cheek that he or she was engaged. Patches became so complicated and various that they generated a whole vocabulary, too, so that a patch on the chin was known as a silencieuse, one on the nose was called l’impudent or l’effrontée, one in the middle of the forehead was a majesteuse, and so on all around the head. In the 1780s, just to show that creative ridiculousness really knew no bounds, it became briefly fashionable to wear fake eyebrows made of mouse skin.
Patches at least were not toxic, and as such were almost the only beauty aid in centuries that wasn’t. There was in England a long tradition of poisoning oneself in the name of beauty. Pupils could be attractively dilated with drops of belladonna, or deadly nightshade. Most dangerous of all was ceruse, a paste made of white lead and commonly known as paint. Ceruse was very popular. For females with smallpox scars it was applied as a kind of spackle, to fill in the divots, but even many women who were free of blemishes used it to give themselves a lovely ghostly pallor. Ceruse remained popular for a remarkably long time. The first reference to it as a cosmetic is in 1519 when it was recorded that women of fashion “whyte their face, necke and pappis [which is to say breasts] with cerusse.” In 1754, the Connoisseur, a periodical, was still marveling that “every lady you meet is besmeared with unguent ceruss and plaister.” Ceruse had three principal drawbacks: it cracked when the wearer smiled or grimaced, after a few hours it turned gray, and if used long enough it could kill. At the very least, it could make eyes swell painfully and teeth loosen and fall out. At least two well-known beauties, the courtesan Kitty Fisher and the socialite Maria Gunning, Countess of Coventry, are said to have died from ceruse poisoning, both while only in their twenties, but no one can begin to guess how many others may have