FAQ

Possible self-portrait of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, 1787

This blog now has a FAQ. This post have a permanent position above.

If you have any questions not covered in this FAQ, please don’t hesitate to contact me at isis.33 at passagen.se

  

Do you sell any products? No, I don’t. I have thought about it, but Swedish regulations make it much too expensive and difficult to do that on a hobby basis.

Where can I buy cosmetics made after historical recipes then? Try these shops:

Ageless Artifice They don’t have a web shop anymore, but they still sell products. You can read my review of several of their 18^th century products here.

Little Bits on Etsy. I don’t have any personal experience of their products, but you can read American Duchess’ review here.

Sally Pointer I have only tried her white lead substitute, but she has done a lot of research into historical cosmetics and knows a lot about it.

Where do you shop for ingredients? You can find a list here.

Where do you find the recipes you use? By playing detective a bit. Searching Google books has proved a bit of a gold mine. Even if the books may not be available online, you at least get titles and authors. When reading books about cosmetics I take note of sources and check them out.

You seem to know a lot about historical makeup. Why don’t you write a book about it? Maybe… I have been thinking about it quite a lot, actually. If I do, though, I don’t think I would be able to pull it off writing it in English, but in my native Swedish.

You use [ingredient X] in a recipe and I’m allergic to that. Why do you use that if people are allergic to it? You can have allergies just about everything, so to provide recipes that no one is allergic to, is impossible. I try to be clear if allergic reactions are common, but I strongly urge anyone who wants to try any of the recipes found here, to do more research about the ingredients needed and to do a patch test.

How historically correct are you? As close as I can. I never use ingredients that are harmful for you and I try to steer clear from anything that are endangered, so recipes including such things are by necessity less correct. I try to find substitutes which are as close as possible to the original ingredient. I also make the recipes with modern equipment.

You wrote [statement y] which isn’t correct. Can I trust that what you write is true? My aim is to be as correct as possible. However, this blog is a research tool for me, not the end product. In other words, my research is ongoing and I constantly go back and revise. I may get things wrong or misunderstand things. If you think something I say is wrong, please ask. Or do a bit of research on your own- research is a great ways to exercise the brain cells.

You mostly write about the 18^th century even if the blog title says it’s about historical makeup. Are you going to write about other time periods as well? My main interest lies mainly with the 17^th and the 18^th century, but I don’t want to restrict myself to that narrow period as I may very well want to write about cosmetics in a broader sense. As I have in a few posts already. I will probably not write much about the 19^th century for the reason that there already is a blog that does that very well:

The Gibson Girl's Guide to Glamor

Sally Pointer also has a few articles on cosmetics.

 

Honey water

 

Eliza Smith’s Compleat Housewife, or Accomplish’d Gentlewoman’s Companion,
 1727

After my post on hair powder I really had to look up the Honey water mentioned in the brown powder recipe. Curiously enough this perfume, despite the name, doesn’t contain any honey. It is also a long recipe; though I will try to break it down to make it easier to overview. 

The recipe

AQUA-MELLIS, OR THE KING'S HONEYWATER.

Take twenty-eight pounds of coriander seeds, ground small in the starch-mill; twenty-eight common bunches of sweet marjoram, in flower, dried and stripped from the twigs, one pound of calamus aromaticus, one pound of yellow saunders, and one pound of orange and lemon peel. Let the three last mentioned substances be separately beaten into gross powder.

Mix the above ingredients, and put them into a sixty-gallon copper-still, and add to them twenty gallons of proof spirits, and the same quantity of rain or spring water.Lute well all the junctures of the apparatus, and leave the ingredients in this state, without fire, for forty-eight hours. At the end of this time, begin to distil by a very gentle heat, lest the flowers and seeds, which are very light, should rise suddenly in the still-head, stop up the worm, and endanger the whole work.

Increase the fire after the first half hour, and keep it regular, thereafter, till the termination of the process.

Draw off about twenty-six or twentyseven gallons, or continue so long as the spirit will burn, by the application of a lighted paper to a small quantity of it in a saucer.

Next day, when the still is perfectly cold, let it be well cleaned out, saving the remaining ingredients for further uses, as will be after directed.

Now return the spirits drawn off yesterday into the still, and add thereto ten or twelve gallons of water. Then put in the following nine ingredients, bruised andmixed as directed. These are to remain in the liquor, in a cold state, for forty-eight hours; attention being still paid to luting and stopping close, as before.

At the end of this time, kindle the fire, and work off (slowly at first) as before, until twenty-six gallons are distilled. Mix all the different runnings together in a copper vessel, kept for this purpose only; and, as for what may come over after the twentysix gallons, it must be kept, and added to the ingredients used for the making of the next quantity of Hungary water.

The nine ingredients alluded to above, are as follows :—

Fourteen ounces of nutmegs, Four ounces of cloves, Twelve ounces of cinnamon bark, Eight ounces of pimento, and Forty ounces of cassia lignum. These are to be separately broken or bruised in an iron mortar, until they are about the size of small peas. If there be any dust, it must be sifted from them before they are used.

When the above are broken, take Forty ounces of storax, Forty ounces of gum benjamin, Forty ounces of labdanum, and Forty venellios, by tale. Break and bruise the above also, but make as little dust as possible. Put the dust from these and the foregoing, together, into a coarse muslin bag, which is to be hung in the still, so that the liquor, during distillation, may extract all its virtues.

Having drawn off, in this second distillation, just twenty-six gallons, add to it, in a copper vessel, that will hold forty gallons, six gallons of orange flower-water, and eight gallons of rose-water, which has been recently made.

Now mix together ten ounces of spirit of musk, ten ounces of spirit of ambergris, half an ounce of true oil of lavender, half an ounce of good essence of bergamot, and half an ounce of oil of rhodium.

When properly mixed, put all these into the copper vessel, and stir the whole well together. It would be better, however, if

these strong perfumes were put in before the orange-flower and rose waters.

Add to all these a quart of milk, which has stood for a night, and which has had all the cream taken clearly off:, then agitate and mix the whole well together, and stop the vessel up close, until the time when it is to be used.

Remarks.

The jar ought to have a lock-cock soldered into it, to prevent accidents. This should be placed fully two inches from the bottom, in order that the milk, and other impurities, may fall to the bottom, and not flow through into the vessels in which it is drawn off for use.

If this honey-water be made in the spring, about March or April, and if the weather be fair, it will be quite fined down in the course of a month; that is, if it be not opened or disturbed. When the perfumer finds, by drawing off a little in a glass, that the milk, &c. have fallen down to the bottom, he may draw the whole off into clean andwell-seasoned stone, or glass, bottles; or much rather into another copper jar.

This composition ought never to be drawn off in rainy or cloudy weather; for then the milk is apt to rise. In warm weather it should be kept cool; and, in winter, as warm as possible. When distilled in the winter, the jars ought to be warmed, otherwise the honey-water will not be fined for five or six months.

If the honey-water be twenty years old, so much the better.

The ingredients from the first distillation should be immediately dried in the sun, otherwise they will become mouldy. When there is a considerable quantity from three or four makings, it ought to be ground in a mill, and finely sifted. They will be found to be of great use in the making of ordinary brown wash-balls,- and, with some additions, of brown powders for the hair.

The ingredients from the second distillation are of much greater value than the above, and therefore require more care in the drying. These are of great use for the best sort of gross powders, for sweet bags, &c.; and, if made into a fine powder, may be made use of, with great success, in the best sort of brown perfumed balls.

The same powder, with fresh ingredients, makes excellent pastils, to burn; and may be further used in making spirit of benjamin. For all these uses, it is necessary to attend to the receipts which will hereafter be given./ The British Perfumer 

Source

Breaking down the recipe

Ingredients that have been described in earlier posts can be found in the ingredients list on the top of the page.

First stage

Coriander seeds An herb, with a citrusy flavor. Very common in Indian cuisine.

Marjoram An herb with a citrus and pine flavor.

Calamus Aromaticus

Yellow sandalwood Aromatic tree. A common ingredient in scents

Orange and Lemon peels The dried peels of the fruits.

There ingredients are steeped in alcohol and water before being distilled. The remains of the spices are saved and dried and the liquid is returned to the still.

Second stage

Add more water and add:

Nutmeg Spice. Dried seeds. Used in cooking, but can be poisonous in large quantities.

Clove

Cinnamon

Pimento A little tricky, perhaps- Pimento can mean a red pepper but it can also mean Allspice, and that is what it means here. That spice is the dried fruits of the of the Pimenta dioica plant

Cassia Sometimes called Bastard cinnamon. Has less taste and rougher texture than true cinnamon and is therefore cheaper.

Storax

Gum Benjamin or Benzoin resin

Labdanum

Venellios Tonka bean, a fragrant seed of the Tonka bean tree; used in perfumes and medicines and as a substitute for vanilla. EDIT: After further research, Venellios is NOT Tonka bean, but an inferior quality of Vanilla. Tonka would probably work well as a substitute, though.

Let it steep again and then distill. Once again the remains are saved and dried, but keep them separate from the first remains.

Third stage

Add

Spirit of Musk Animalistic scent originally derived from the glands from various animals, like musk deer. Today synthetic musk is almost exclusively used. Probably the most common base note in perfumes. Spirit of musk is an alcohol extract.

Spirit of Ambergris Ambergris is a waxy substance that comes from the digestive tracks of Sperm whales. Prepared it smells wonderful and has been used as fixative and base note in perfume for a long time. It can be ethically harvested, but the price is very high so usually synthetic substitutes are used. Spirit of ambergris is an alcohol extract.

Lavender oil

Bergamot essence Comes from Bergamot orange, which looks like a yellow orange. Used in scents and to flavor Earl Grey tea.

Rhodium oil, or Rosewood oil

Orange flower water A distillation of fresh bitter-orange blossoms

Rose water

Milk

Stir and leave it to settle

Fourth stage

When the milk, along with any impurities has settled at the bottom, decant the perfume into suitable bottles.

 

The dried remains can be used to perfume scent bags and powder.

My thoughts

There are a lot of ingredients in the recipe and with steeping and distilling it takes several days to come to the end of the third stage. The recipe suggests that the fourth stage will take months. The recipe also has huge quantities, which isn’t surprising as Charles Lillie was a perfumer by trade. I would really like to try this one, on a much smaller scale, of course. Most of the perfume recipes I have read demand real ambergris and musk, which would mean trying to convert it, as essence if what I can get my hand on. This recipe, as you can see, doesn’t need any such thing.

The problem that needs to be solved is the distillation process. Steam distillation in short, short is boiling water, making the steam go through the scent matter, leading the condensed liquid into another container and cool it. Hey presto, scent! I don’t really have the room to by any fancy apparatus, but I have found some simpler arrangements, like this one. For a smaller amount, it does seem to be doable.

 

I wonder if the perfume turns out spicy or flowery. The first batch of ingredients all have a citrusy scent, which ought to mean that the top notes will have a lemon quality. Then it would have spicy/resinous middle tones and muck and ambergris as base. Sounds quite a lot like a perfume I would enjoy!

Alchemy satire, 18th-century artwork