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Fashion
The real story behind Margot Robbie’s wild Queen Elizabeth I makeup.
02
Aug
Aug
Mary Queen of Scots opens on Friday, featuring Saoirse Ronan as Mary and Margot Robbie as Elizabeth I. In Robbie ’ s Elizabeth, we get the latest filmic theatrical performance of the fagot ’ s celebrated chalk-white side and bright-red wigs. Interviews with Robbie have intelligibly focused on the remarkable makeup and prosthetics the crew created for the actress, though not everyone loves the look—my colleague Inkoo Kang hilariously called it “ perilously close to Ronald McDonald cosplay ” in her review. The movie doesn ’ thyroxine very delve into the question of Elizabeth ’ s makeup directly, but her shockingly white face is a deeply weave part of the historical image of this singular queen, and it ’ s worth unpack in greater detail .
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In our historical memory, Queen Elizabeth I owed her clown-white face to ceruse—a shape of powdered lead. Archaeologists have found traces of white jumper cable in the graves of upper-class women who lived as army for the liberation of rwanda back as ancient Greece, Lisa Eldridge reports in her history of constitution. Nor were the Greeks the only ones in the ancient worldly concern to hit upon the idea of using tip to whiten. Eldridge writes that ceruse—the cosmetic gunpowder produced via a process combining lead and vinegar—may have been in use in ancient China ampere early as the period of the Shang Dynasty ( c. 1600–1046 B.C. )
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In Europe during the Renaissance, “ women in both city and nation used cosmetics freely, unaffected by satires and sermons and the unfortunate effects of poisonous ingredients, ” Richard Corson writes. Corson adds that ladies who could afford it sometimes applied one coating of white lead powderize on top of another— “ either to avoid the worry of removing the paint each day, or in order to fill in wrinkles. ” Neck and décolletage received a coating adenine well. other whitening preparations included powdered borax and sulphur, but white lead was the most effective. The type branded “ Venetian white lead, ” besides called “ spirits of Saturn, ” was, Eldridge writes, “ the most fashionable, expensive, and toxic skin bleaching agent available in the sixteenth century ” —so expensive that nobility ( and royalty ) were its major users .
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When young, Elizabeth ( who ruled from 1558 to 1603 ) was, reportedly, a naturally fine-looking charwoman. Eldridge writes that a visitor to court when Elizabeth was 24 described her as “ bonny quite than handsome … tall and grammatical, with a beneficial skin, although dark-skinned ; she has all right eyes and above all, a beautiful hand with which she makes display. ” As Eldridge points out, Elizabeth ’ s beget, Anne Boleyn, “ was reported to have olive skin, ” which accounts for the mention of “ swarthiness. ” But it ’ s hard to tell for sure what Elizabeth looked like, because, as learner Anna Riehl argues, contemporaneous documents of the king ’ sulfur physical appearance—be they textual reports or aesthetic productions—were always partially political. People perceived a queen ’ sulfur beauty as a sign of her divine right to rule. As Elizabeth ’ s predominate proceeded, perceptions of her forcible smasher and her exponent were always more entangled .
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It’s hard to tell for sure what Elizabeth looked like, because contemporary documents of the queen’s physical appearance—be they textual reports or artistic productions—were always partially
political.
Elizabethan women had their reasons for wishing to present a wholly flannel face—the appearance of young person and birthrate ; conformity to an ideal of smasher that demanded women look like they never worked outside in the sun. ( Despite racial undertones that read as very familiar to us today, the prioritization of white in female beauty in 16th-century England seems to have had more to do with classism than racism. contemporary sources show that anti-black racism was stage in Elizabethan culture ; however, as my colleague Jamelle Bouie recently wrote, nuance of the kind of widespread hierarchical racist thinking that we know today came late, during the Enlightenment. )
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But Queen Elizabeth ’ sulfur relationship to her own soundbox and her presentation was even more complex. She was a female ruler and remained unmarried. Throughout her reign, there were those who questioned her justly to be on the toilet. The unusual fact of her queenship intend that her consistency was under significant scrutiny. “ The body politic of English affinity was incarnated in the natural body of an unmarried womanhood, ” Louis Montrose writes, which “ ensured that sex and sex were foregrounded in representing the Elizabethan state. ”
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During her reign, Elizabeth became an icon to worship—the Protestant object of a “ royal cult ” that, Montrose reports, clashed with and contested the Catholic worship of the Virgin Mary. This “ cult of Elizabeth, ” which emphasized her virginity and beauty, provoked a compass of responses among Britons, who “ sustained, elaborated, and appropriated [ the cult ] to their own ends ” during her time in baron. Living inside it all, Elizabeth clearly seemed to realize her presentation of a mask that didn ’ triiodothyronine slip was critical to her survival .
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Did Elizabeth consumption white lead to excess, as most every filmic representation of the queen from the 20th and 21st centuries would have us believe ? Elizabeth had smallpox in 1562, which apparently left her with tell-tale pocks ( or pits ) on her face. The combination of her “ darkness, ” these blemishes, and the aging action ( which would have been abetted by the use of the toxic run gunpowder ) may have led her to apply however more white lead as time went on and her skin became more and more unsightly. That might have resulted in a buffoonish appearance, like Robbie ’ second in the latter separate of the new Mary Queen of Scots .
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But, Anna Riehl argues, there are very few contemporary testimonies to Elizabeth ’ sulfur supposed white lead overuse. One very colorful mention from late 1600 is frequently repeated in late histories—the aging Elizabeth, according to this account, “ was continuously painted not only wholly over her face, but on her very neck and breast besides … the same was in some places near half an inch thick. ” But this bill seems to have been a street rumor, “ picked up by Father Rivers, a Jesuit in hiding ” during a time when Catholics ( specially Jesuits ) were persecuted in England. Riehl sees Rivers ’ report card as unlikely to be true in every detail, but historically important however because it shows how Elizabeth ’ s critics used her habit of “ painting ” against her .
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even if they didn ’ thymine immediately criticize Elizabeth for it, her contemporary ( male ) writers hated the very being of white lead. Andreas de Laguna, a doctor to Pope Julius III who Corson cites in his history of makeup, said the paint had been invented by the devil. Firenzuola, an italian monk ( who used a single name ), published a bible on ideal Renaissance smasher in 1548. Firenzuola decried use of the rouge as an example of women ’ randomness absurdity. “ These anserine maids, ” he wrote, “ believe that men, whom they seek to please, do not discern this malodorousness, which I would have them to know wears them out and makes them grow old before their time, and destroys their teeth, while they seem to be wearing a dissemble all the year through. ”
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religious writers made the habit of white lead and other cosmetics a particular concern. Philip Stubbes ’ The Anatomie of Abuses ( 1583 ) included a religious review of cosmetics : “ Thinkest thousand that thou canst make thy self fair than God who made us all ? These must needs be their inventions, or else they would never go about to colour their faces with such sibbersauces. ” ( “ Sibbersauces ” ! Put that disused synonym for “ concoction ” in your pocket for later. ) Puritan Thomas Tuke wrote in a 1616 Discourse Against Painting and Tincturing : “ A motley face is a false face. ” He charged that women who used white lead were “ despicable, enormious [ abnormal ], and atrocious, ” and that one could “ well cut off a curd or cheese-cake from either of their buttock. ”
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Our historical understand of Elizabeth ’ second decline has been built around her defeated conceit. Elizabeth was 69 when she died, and had been queen for 45 years. Ben Jonson wrote, 16 years after her death, that Elizabeth “ never saw herself after she became erstwhile in a truthful glass ” ; according to this floor, her servants painted her, and sometimes had fun by putting scarlet ( a loss rouge ) on her nose, knowing that she ’ d never see it. Anna Riehl wonders how true this anecdote is. Was Jonson reporting a accuracy or “ indulging the younger generation ’ s frustration with an aged monarch ” ? Either way, Riehl sees the story as reflecting “ a typical misogynous misgiving of the perceived vulnerability and waning ability of the aged queen. ”
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How did Elizabeth die ? Blood poisoning from all that white boldness paint she may have relied upon ? Pneumonia, streptococcus, cancer ? No autopsy was performed on her body, so we will never know. By the end of her life, she had lost all her teeth and was largely incapacitated. The Royal Museums of Greenwich, on a page about the myths and mysteries that however surround Elizabeth ’ s death, writes that Elizabeth Southwell, one of the queen ’ south lady-in-waiting, “ reported that the Queen was haunted by visions of her frail body, ” and that “ her cadaver was so full moon of noxious vapours that it exploded in her lead coffin. ” ( Dryly, the museum adds : “ Southwell proved to be an treacherous source after she converted to Catholicism following the Queen ’ s death. ” )
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Southwell and Jonson aside, cultural representations of Elizabeth ’ s old age and end were largely kind until the second separate of the nineteenth hundred, when, Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson compose, “ Elizabeth would actually be discovered as a pathetic, if dangerous, old fraud. ” Her practice of cosmetics and wigs became cardinal to this effigy. Writers and painters began to depict Elizabeth as a absurd and conceited honest-to-god maid. satirically represented by the writer Walter Savage Landor, she ’ second described as “ a cheeseparing honest-to-god goshawk, all talon and plumage. ” In 1848 Augustus Leopold Egg exhibited his paint Queen Elizabeth Discovers She Is no Longer Young, a re-creation of a supposed incident when the old queen looked in a mirror for the first time in years. Dobson and Watson describe the painting as “ punitive, ” a knead of art that crystallizes “ the Victorians ’ unprecedented preoccupation with Elizabeth ’ s previous age. ”
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Dobson and Watson write that this raw representation of Elizabeth as a decaying womanhood was besides a criticism of the monarchy. “ By destroying Elizabeth ’ s charming agelessness, a cardinal component of contemporary nationalist Elizabethan nostalgia, ” Egg ’ s painting made a comment on England ’ s current state. flush children ’ second books in the victorian period used Elizabeth ’ s amour propre to teach a moral lesson. “ With all her courage, ” children ’ mho magazine Bow Bells wrote, “ ‘ good Queen Bess ’ had not strength of mind to look her wrinkles in the face. ”
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One of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, “reported that the Queen was haunted by visions of her frail body,” and that “her corpse was so full of noxious vapours that it exploded in her lead
coffin.”
yet some—be it out of cavalier sentiment or gallantry—continued to defend Elizabeth. Dobson and Watson point to writer Charles Kingsley, who argued in 1855 : “ Men had accepted [ Elizabeth ’ s youthful smasher ] as what beauty of form and expression broadly is, an outbound and visible sign of the inward and religious grace ; and while the inbound was unaltered, what wonder if she tried to preserve the outward ? If she was the same, why should she not try to look the same ? ”
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lead gunpowder remained in function through the nineteenth hundred, when Eldridge writes that “ the surface of women ’ mho journals meant that women shared their findings and became more grok about potentially harmful whiteners like arsenic and lead. ” But some women didn ’ triiodothyronine get the message. historian Kathy Peiss writes that a 19th-century american english doctor reported in a medical journal the font of “ Mary C., ” a housewife in St. Louis who used a commercial peel lightener, sold as “ Laird ’ s Bloom of Youth, ” for years, before being admitted to a hospital in 1877 with her arms paralyzed. This affected role finally died of lead poisoning ; the repair, Peiss writes, “ condemned women ’ s dressing table as he exposed a dangerous commercial product. ”
The use of conduct in cosmetics seems like a absurd keepsake of history now. But run powder, whether used by Elizabeth ( in myth or truth ) or the american english Mary C., was an expensive intersection that slowly sapped women ’ south forte, even as it promised an extension of their meager power. In that, it ’ randomness painfully familiar .
