| The Roman Makeover Homework Help Sally Pointer |
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| My Roman Makeover page brings me lots of requests for help with school or college projects about Roman perfumes and cosmetics. I'm not proposing to do the work for you, but I can help you find the information you need to expand on the information in my pages for yourself. I hope this will be of some help! Primary Sources: We are very lucky that the Romans wrote down a great deal of information about everyday items and practices. This applies to cosmetics too, and there are a few writers who give us most of our information. At the moment there is no one place to find all of these texts online, so you will have to go to your local library and request some of these texts. Where I know of a link to a reasonable version I'll add it here. These writers are the main sources for information on Roman cosmetic practice: Pliny: 'Natural History' Pliny wrote an enormous amount about the world as he understood it. He talks about distant countries, medicines, crops, strange people and perfumes and cosmetics. His writing are easily available in translation and are really very straightforwards to read. Ask your librarian for the Loeb edition if they have it (it has the Latin on one side of the page and the English on the other, so you can compare the two). Volume XII has most of the information you need, but if your library has the whole set it is worth browsing through the rest as occasional mentions are made elsewhere. Be warned, Pliny often copied earlier writers! The entire text of Pliny's Natural History is available online in latin here, and there are links to English translations where they exist- but be warned, the English versions online are often taken from seventeenth century translations so may not be as up to date as the Loeb edition you'll be able to get from the library! Ovid: 'The Arts of Love' Ovid write poems and letters to his lady friends about make-up and there is some great material about not having hairy armpits or not using too much hair dye so your hair falls out in his work. Again, other work by him mention cosmetics, but 'amores' ('the arts of love') is the best starting point. Theophrastus: 'Concerning Odours' Also available in a Loeb edition, Theophrastus is the earliest writer to talk at length about perfumes. He gives lists of ingredients for many of them and this is really useful when trying to work out recipes. Dioscorides: 'Materia Medica' This one is a bit trickier. The only major translation available is several hundred years old and hasn't been in print for several decades. your library will have to order it specially for you (its too expensive to buy) and it isn't online to my knowledge. Its the most important source for recipes because Dioscorides actually gives quantities with his recipes! He was a Greek surgeon in the roman army and was mostly interested in the medicinal properties of perfumes, but he does talk about women using crocodile dung on their faces and describes loads of perfumes. He's one of my all time favourite writers and its worth the effort to get his book on interlibrary loan. How to research your project. Some of you will already be really good at this bit, but I know that others of you are just starting out on your first big projects and term papers, and no-one ever seems to explain just how to find all that lovely information. Here's a short guide: Internet research is helpful to a point. There are lots of pages out there that say 'the Romans did this...', but unless they give you some clues as to where the original information came from, they won't get you many marks on that paper. Apart from anything else, how do you know that the author of the page knew what they were talking about or hadn't just copied someone else? Internet research is however, very useful to give you a broad idea of what questions you need to ask and where to look for the answers. Primary Sources: This means documents written down at the time of the Romans, archaeological remains and sometimes research papers written by people directly studying physical remains. Basically, anything that is a direct, first hand account of the evidence. Be aware though that even documents from the time period you are studying may be wrong! Roman writers copied each other or got their facts muddled just as often as people do today. So the best way to check that your information is correct is to cross reference. this just means that you try and find evidence in more than one place. So if a Roman writer says that women wore makeup, you might check a few museums to see if they have any artifacts that support this theory. If they do, then you can be pretty sure that the writer was telling you the truth, and you can prove your point in your essay much more easily. Secondary Sources: This means books, web pages etc that report evidence found elsewhere. My website is largely a secondary source as I don't actually spell out every last part of the evidence. (Although if you were writing about reconstructing early make-up, then I'm a primary source, as it's me that is doing the research- get it?) Books about the history of make-up are also secondary sources. Some will give you the information you need to find the primary source, and they can be really useful for getting a good rough idea of what is going on and how the subject relates to what was happening before or after, but these sources aren't enough on their own. You could use them to help set up the thesis for your paper (this means the bit at the beginning where you explain the statement that you are trying to resolve, for example, your paper might be on 'Roman Make-up', and your thesis would be 'Roman women wore lots of make-up, and much of it was made from poisonous materials'. You might go on to explain that many histories of make-up mention this fact- and give some examples-, and you intend to prove it by referring to the original sources and archaeological evidence. Say all that at the beginning and you can then go on to write about the primary sources.) Ingredients: Lots of you ask about recipes so you can do a Roman Makeover in front of your class. I have to tell you that most of the recipes are quite complicated and use expensive ingredients as well as taking a long time to prepare. Some use poisonous or dangerous ingredients too. However, you could do a version that uses safer ingredients and explain whilst you do your presentation that the originals were hard to get or dangerous. Here are some of the safer ones you might consider trying. Whatever you use, I strongly suggest you read up on even the safe sounding ingredients, and never ever apply any reconstructed cosmetic to anyone that you know has sensitive skin or tends to be allergic to ingredients! Much safer to apply these things to the back of your hand where you can wash it off straight after showing the effect. Even safer, use modern make-up and just talk about the early versions. I use the 'real thing' as part of my research, but I wouldn't use it to make-up for a night out! White face paint: Never use lead! Chalk was used and is safer, so is flour (but it doesnt stick very well) Red cheek/lip colour: Red mercuric sulphide is mega poisonous! Red Ochre is still used in lipstick today and won't poison you (try not to swallow it though!) Eyeliner: Galena is a form of lead, but they also used soot from holding a spoon over a candle. This is almost pure carbon and is fairly safe. Its still used in make-up today, but be very careful with anything round your eyes. Eyeshadow. Saffron was used, and we still cook with it. As a one-off demonstration its unlikely to be dangerous, but anything with a strong perfume like saffron can cause some people to come out in a rash. Be very careful. Skin creams and perfumes: An olive oil base is pretty safe, as is beeswax used to thicken creams. Many Roman perfumes used a lot of spices such as cinnamon, and we know today that cinnamon can upset your skin really easily. Rose would be a fairly safe perfume to try, and so would herb based scents. Read the original recipes and be prepared to choose a simple recipe with ingredients you can demonstrate are used in skin products all the time. Rosewater can be bought in supermarkets and chemists and is safe. If in doubt, Don't use it!!! I do have a full length book out which covers the history of perfumes and cosmetics from prehistory to the twentieth century. Its called 'The Artifice of Beauty, a history and practical guide to perfumes and cosmetics', and you should be able to get it through your local library. One last thing, you often ask if you can use images from my site in your project. The answer is yes if you can honestly say yes to the following statements:
Good luck with your project! Sally |
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