A Brief History of Cosmetics
People have worn cosmetics for at least six thousand years. For most of that time, nobody checked whether they were safe.
Written and reviewed by Sarah Hitchcox, RN, BSN
Cosmetics are older than written history. Ground ochre pigments show up in burial sites tens of thousands of years old, and by the time of the Egyptians, makeup was an organized craft with dedicated vessels, recipes and professional standards. What did not exist, for almost all of that history, was any idea of testing whether the products were safe.
The ancient world
Egyptian kohl, the black eye paint seen in every pharaoh portrait, was typically made from galena, a lead ore. Romans lightened their faces with ceruse, a white lead paste, and that habit persisted through Elizabethan England. Lead absorbed through the skin causes hair loss, scarring and neurological damage, which contemporaries noticed and mostly attributed to other causes. The pattern repeats for centuries: the ingredient that produced the effect was also the poison.
When it got worse before it got better
The 1800s and early 1900s industrialized the problem. Victorian pharmacies sold arsenic wafers for a pale complexion. In the 1920s and 30s, radium appeared in face creams marketed as energizing. The breaking point in the United States came in 1933, when an aniline dye eyelash tint called Lash Lure blinded more than a dozen women and killed one. At the time, no federal law let anyone remove it from sale.
That case helped push through the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, the first US law giving the FDA authority over cosmetics. Modern rules have tightened since, most recently with the 2022 MoCRA update, which added mandatory facility registration and adverse-event reporting.
What six thousand years teaches
- Natural was never the same thing as safe. Lead, arsenic and radium are all natural.
- Marketing has outrun evidence in every era. The claims changed, the pattern did not.
- Safety came from testing and regulation, not from tradition or price.
- The consumer skills that matter now are reading an ingredient list and patch testing, not trusting a story.
Where that leaves a modern routine
Today’s cosmetics are the safest in history, and the lesson still applies at the margins: unregulated products, imported skin lighteners and viral remedies are where the old pattern survives. If a product promises a dramatic change, the honest version of that promise usually lives in a clinical setting, where the ingredient, the dose and the person applying it are all accountable.