I've been doing sneaky shop updates for a week or two now but it's finally time to post about them! I've got a bunch of new historically-inspired stuff live on my BigCartel shop -- you can use the code SOLSTICE for 20% off your whole order from now through 6/21.
1840s-Inspired Shaving Soap
A nice puck of tallow shaving soap for use with a shaving brush or your regular-degular hands. Enriched with a shitload of other oils and lightly scented with Atlas cedar, frankincense, and patchouli. I've got an upcoming post about shaving and 1840s shaving soaps so stay tuned!
Carnivale Lip Tints
Three buildable shade options for the girlies (gn) formulated with mango butter, beeswax, and sweet almond oil. All three of these use historically-attested ~*~*lip rouge~*~*~ pigments, incorporating carmine; if there's any interest in vegan versions of these using period vegetable waxes/pigments, let me know!
Shades, top to bottom: Graham Gore Red; Royal Marine Red; Platypus Pond Pink
Historically-Inspired Perfume Oils
Sold in 5ml amber glass apothecary vials -- these are 1840s-inspired but otherwise completely modern because they won't let me distill any floral waters in my one-bedroom apartment. All citrus-based oils used in these blends are FC-free.
Francis Crozier - Ambergris, musk, rosemary, spike lavender, lemon, orange, and petitgrain
James Fitzjames - Oakmoss, patchouli, Bulgarian rose, jasmine, neroli, and bergamot.
Hydesville Ghost - Atlas cedar, Bulgarian rose, rosemary, benzoin, myrrh.
Huile de Florida - Neroli, bergamot, lemon, rosemary, clove, rose geranium, bitter orange, and cardamom.
I had a ton of fun making these and I look forward to sharing them! These have been in the works since earlier this year and I'm hyped to get them out to people.
Some general updates: I've retired the Gallipot Project Etsy store because, whew, no kidding, Etsy's policies are bad bad. My first run of white Windsor soaps didn't turn out exactly how I'd like it to, but the second batch should be live and available before long. I'm also investigating other mid-19th-century soap formulations and their accompanying scents. Follow my projects and historical cosmetics and hygiene meta at my #unnamed terror fandom beauty project tag!
I watched a great video where makeup historian Erin Parsons debunked Queen Elizabeths white face paint myth
but the most interesting bit to me was where she used actual ingredients to recreate historic makeup recipes
and I loved to see how sheer the finished product was. They described it as sheer like zinc sunscreen and brightening and blurring. and it just reminded me of my favorite mineral sunscreen
Ads for „Tatras’ Snow” face cream, produced by Falkiewicz company. Wacław Falkiewicz established his company in Paris in 1911, after WWI moved the production to Poznań.
can you tell me about make-up (eyeshadow mostly) in the series? would naraku and sesshomaru REALLY put on make-up regularly (and sometimes it looks as though naraku changed his?) or is it natural? it seems it's been around since izayoi and since kikyo, but who'd all have access to it?
I’ve been pondering this and like, I’m pretty sure that Sesshomaru’s “eyeshadow” is actually part of his natural markings, just like the “floof” is part of his body and the stripes on his other parts (which are similar in color) are natural-seeming markings. The placement of course IS clearly meant by Takahashi to evoke eyeshadow though, because his entire character design concept was “gorgeous” (i.e. he’s meant to be super glam) lol so there’s that. But again, even his ~furry boa~ as it were, is a natural (or I supposed I should say supernatural!) part of his body - so I see no reason to assume his eye markings are makeup that he’s separately applied. I’ve always headcanoned that they were natural markings, just like the stripes.
Naraku I’m less sure on. He is a shapeshifter, so it’s entirely possible it’s natural markings on him as well, that he chooses as he sees fit. But then, he also was mimicking a nobleman, so it’s hard to say. Did noblemen of that period wear eye makeup? I honestly have no clue - I know some women at least wore lip paint that was in little jar type containers (which is why the anime gets away with showing Inuyasha giving Kikyo a container of it that “belonged to his mother” - something that isn’t in the manga, but isn’t, I’m told, historically inaccurate either). I’m less certain about eyeshadow-type cosmetics though and I’m also uncertain about whether it was as gendered as it is in the modern West or not. Sengoku era cosmetics is something I’m not very knowledgeable on, I know less about those than I do Sengoku period clothing (and I already freely admit I don’t know everything about THAT, either).Though I do know that in the manga, at least, Takahashi does write at least one woman wearing what we would call a type of eyeshadow: Sango, who in keeping with the meaning of her name, wears “coral”-colored eyeshadow herself :) So tldr I think we can assume that Takahashi at least has written it as eyeshadow existing in that period - I just don’t think it’s what Sesshomaru’s little eye markings are made of and I am completely uncertain of whether Naraku is wearing any either, let alone who if anybody outside of women, would be wearing it or not (they might! Modern Western culture isn’t every culture that existed, after all. I just don’t know which it is).
Experiments In Early Victorian Skincare: Bone Marrow Hair Oil
(You can find previous posts on this topic here -- next up we've got some white salves.)
Okay, ngl, this is the part of my self-imposed mission that I have been considering with the most trepidation. Not because marrow oil is objectively, in some way, less clean or more gross than the other rendered animal fats used in hair and skincare products of the era -- I found the process of buying and preparing to handle these marrow bones to be surprisingly unsettling. Not anything about the purchasing process or sourcing beef bones, either, which was as normal and cordial as any other specialty meat purchase I might make -- all I can chalk it up to is looking at the bones themselves and being acutely aware that… hey… crack open my own femur and you'd find marrow there too. [CW for a lot of animal meat, bone, and fat to follow if you're squeamish or prefer to avoid it.]
Marrow holds a horror for me that I find hard to understand in any other terms than the knowledge that I, too, am made of meat -- fittingly given The Terror's themes of subsistence cannibalism, arbitrary European squeamishness, and the smudgy line between human and animal. (In the butcher's shop, one of my friends saw my squeamishness and leaned over to whisper "just pretend you're in The Terror!", so that's where my brand is at right now. She didn't even know about this whole project, just that I'm a ghoul.)
To get the marrow out of these bones, I effectively made the most gross, boring bone broth imaginable -- I pressure cooked the frozen marrow bones (maybe eight-inch lengths of some long cattle bone, around two and a half pounds) in six cups of water for four hours and let the pressure release naturally. When I opened up my Instant Pot, all the remaining shreds of flesh had cooked off of the bones and it was already looking rich and oily The smell of boiled bones isn't gross or repulsive in any way, but it doesn't smell exactly good either, and I made it worse by immediately splashing myself with still piping-hot boiled bone water. The first thing I realized after cussing and tending to the burn was that the remaining liquid was seriously fatty -- the few places it had splashed besides my bare hand were already congealing with milky-colored oil -- and that the cooked marrow slid out of the cylinder of bone all in one piece, no prodding necessary. The bones looked… about like I'd expect boiled beef bones to look, after growing up in a household full of big carnivorous dogs who liked to chew on bones and antlers and stuff, but the inside structures were surprisingly delicate and lacy.
I let the vile bone water cool and thanked my lucky fucking stars I wasn't having to eat plain bone water. My plan was to let the """""broth""""" cool in the refrigerator and then skim the fat from the top, discard any lingering meaty solids and liquid runoff, then melt and filter the rendered fat.
I poured it into a casserole dish to maximize the surface area and promised myself I would wait. I did not wait. I waited like, 4 hours, then broke the cooled layer of fat on top like a pane of ice, picked it off with a spatula, melted it down, and poured the resulting slurry of rendered fat and lingering meat debris into a jar. Including the slurry of meat debris, which rapidly sank to the bottom.
The oil… honestly was much less gross than the bone water had been. It's a nice rich yellow color when liquid and relatively odorless; what smell there was felt weirdly comforting, and then I realized I associate the smell of simmered bones and breaking-down collagen with Amish-style pot pie. (Not incidentally, also a dish that through long-term simmering transforms left-over bones and any lingering shreds of meat on them into a rich fatty broth.) It's hard to imagine a Victorian housewife or thrifty cook balking at any part of this. If I'd been born in 1815, this whole process would have been second nature to me, not a harrowing meat ordeal but a part of the practice of domestic economy. Kind of cool stuff.
I re-heated the oil in a water bath, filtered it through a coffee filter because I can't find my fucking cheesecloth and wasn't super relishing the thought of reusing fatty cheesecloth-- this may have been my undoing because it required several layers' worth of coffee filtering to keep the weight of the hot oil from just blasting through the seams. I was able to extract around four ounces of liquid fat, nearly halved, but a more efficient filter setup could have saved a good chunk of that. My hands got good and lubed up during the process and I really felt a kinship with Ishmael in his A Squeeze Of The Hand rhapsodies, as well as a genuine horror of how much cleanup this was going to take. Straight, I'd say this stuff is uncomfortably rich, and I don't know how easily it'd be absorbed into the skin.
(from Beasley's General Receipt-Book)
What to do with around four ounces of clarified beef marrow? I ended up going wit Beasley's recipe for marrow oil instead of the promised fluide de Java, not wanting to tinker with melting down wax, but not having a frame of reference for "the desired consistence" threw up a hurdle -- seeing it alongside hair oils it seemed reasonable to wager we're going for a consistency slightly more substantial than almond or olive oil alone. but still liquid at room temperature. (Liquid at polar temperatures, harder to say.) I went with a 1:1 ratio of clarified marrow to sweet almond oil, scented with clove bud, cedar, and sweet orange -- I had to go back to up the amount of fragrance after realizing quite how aromatic the marrow still was. (If I had my druthers, I love the smell of clove, but among essential oils it's particularly touchy due to its eugenol content so I kept things below the IFRA threshold for dermal use. If you make any kind of fragranced product, from apparel to solid perfume to baby wipes, you should check out IFRA's standards.
Some of the recipes I see in other texts suggest that the yellowness of marrow-based hair oils is a distinguishing quality, which might explain the use of olive oil in Beasley's fluide de Java recipe; at room temperature the mix has a pale yellow, cloudy consistency while remaining freely liquid. Frankly it still smells uncomfortably beefy. Later writer Arnold J. Cooley could have given me a better sense of the ratio of marrow to almond oil for a marrow-oil hair treatment -- he recommends 3 parts marrow oil to 8 parts almond.
If you're interested in somebody absolutely spilling the tea on the state of the Victorian hair oil retail market, his chapter on it is a treat. In particular he has a low opinion of fluide de Java:
If I were making this over again I'd probably hew to the Cooley measurements, the better to stretch the amount of marrow, and up the fragrance even further -- but I'm already dreading using this stuff on my hair.
The days are getting longer and we're on our way out of Ice Hell at last... hopefully... so use the code COLDBOYS for 30% off on my BigCartel store through April 1! I've got some new 1840s skincare and beauty items coming up soon once they've had a chance to rest and I'd like to make some room in the area of my fridge dedicated to weird balms.
What's new: finally a specific attested historical item! I made up a batch of pine resin salve from the formulation given in the Edinburgh New Dispensatory. (As usual, minus the lard, but if you're hankering for a meat-based variation let me know.) Cyriax posits that this is the mystery dried-up ointment in the tin labeled "Ground Ginger" found among the medical supplies in the chest left at Point Victory; unguentum resinae (unguentum resinosum if you're Scottish and/or fancy, aka basilicon ointment) was in common 19th century use for dressing blisters and burns, both for the antimicrobial/counter-irritating qualities ascribed to pine resin itself and its adhesive properties in conjunction with dressings. Feel free to use on sore joints, dry or windburned skin, or as part of a funky little chest rub for congestion, but please don't dress any suppurating scurvy wounds with this stuff or anything else.
The Gallipot Project is going on summer vacation from 6/21-6/30! You can still make purchases during this time, but orders will not ship out to anybody until I'm back on land. Some other updates:
Sucked it up and made a freestanding Wordpress blog just for the formulary/making-of posts so nobody has to go wading through my Tumblr unless they want to. All of my posts on researching and making skincare/beauty products of this era will be crossposted there if you'd like to keep up without seeing 900 NBC Hannibal gifsets.
Coming soon to the blog: unguentum resinosum and a primer on 1840s shaving and shaving soaps
Coming soon to the shop: Windsor and Naples soaps, egg yolk facial soaps, Disco Hickey highlighters, and other sundries...
Are there any products you'd like to see or any questions you have about Early Victorian men's personal care and beauty products? Please let me know either here in the replies or at [email protected].
