27 De Marzo

Bronze sculpture, EXPANSION. By Paige Bradley.

“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in…”

Cuando nadie mira. Alejandra G. Remón

“Me gusta la gente sentipensante, que no separa la razón del corazón. Que siente y piensa a la vez. Sin divorciar la cabeza del cuerpo, ni la emoción de la razón.”

—

Eduardo Galeano

Pedro Andreu, El frío

Fantasy Guide to Make-Up and Cosmetics

If I am to be completely honest with you all, I know nothing about make-up. Those little brushes and endless sponges mean nothing to me except the fact that they are really soft and sometimes shiny. I don't wear makeup so you can imagine how useless I am at modern make-up.

However, history is my jam and I know about what make-up they use centuries ago. So never fear @theflyingravenbird I got you.

Ingredients and Applications

Make-up and cosmetics of the past were usually sourced from natural ingredients. The more difficult the ingredients were the more expensive the cosmetic was. Natural dies such as red ochre and berries were used to stain lips or colour powder to use as blusher to add colour to the lips. For examples:

Geishas of Japan are probably the most recognizable make-up wearers in the world. Historically and in some more traditional okiyas, the geishas painted their faces with rice powder to give them that unbroken, white complexion. A popular recipe for their crimson lipsticks involved extracting pigment from crushed safflower petals.

Henna paste made from the eponymous plant can be used as hair dye and to trace designs on the feet and hands.

Kohl is a black powder that is famous for its popularity in Egyptian Cultures and even the Persian Empire. Kohl lines the eyes like modern eyeliners and is found when one grounds stibnite. Kohl actually had the luck of preventing eye infections which no doubt helped in the climate of Egypt and beyond.

The Phoenicians used powdered metals of gold, silver and other metals to dust their faces. This is reputably thought to denote their wealthy status.

Rouge or blusher has had numerous recipes throughout history. The Ancient Egyptians made rouge from red ochre and animal fat. The Romans made their rouge from lead and cinnabar, which sounds about as bad for you as you think it does. The Ancient Greeks made it from pressed mulberries or other fruits such as beet and strawberries. The Ancient Chinese made rouge from extracts of coloured flowers.

Ancient Chinese cultures used a mixture of gumarabic, gelatin, beeswax, and eggs to stain their nails. The colors were often used to denote social class. Gold and silver was worn by royalty or black and red. The lower classes were not prohibited to wear bright colours.

Lipstick has also a few recipes. Egyptians used pounded carmine, a kind of insect, to smear on their lips. Other ancient civilizations used red ochre. Vermilion (though toxic) was also used, along with crushed flowers with red pigment mixed with beeswax during the Elizabethan period.

During the late Elizabeth and then again in the Baroque period, women and some men began to paint their faces with white powder. The layer of white lead and vinegar, or ceruse was popular for tears despite the hair loss and death it caused.

Make Up Tools

Powderpuffs: the powderpuff was a pad of soft material meant to apply powder to one's face. They were made of feathers, cotton or sheep's fleece.

Brushes: Brushes have been been around for ever. They have been found in some of the earliest Egyptian tombs. The brushes were often made from animal hair with wooden or more expensive handles.

Pots of pigment, scents and ointments: Some early tombs excavated from ancient civilizations have included what amounts to a palette (thank you lil sis for that word). The pigments in the pots would be very expensive. Ointments and balms have also been found. Perfumes were very popular in antiquity and made a recurrence in Europe after the Crusades (which helped since some of the make up smelled awful).

Make Up and Social standing

Though make up is rather popular now, it had a rather uncertain rise to popularity.

Most Ancient civilizations wore some kind of cosmetic. The overuse of cosmetics in ancient times was frowned on as prostitutes and actors often wore dramatic make up however the elite often smeared themselves with powders to make them paler and redden their cheeks.

In the Middle Ages, makeup had a dual reputation. The Church frowned on it because it was again popular with prostitutes and actors but it was a common consensus that if the woman was scarred from smallpox or some other disease she was excused from being labelled as vain.

In the late Elizabethan period, theatres were getting more popular and as was makeup. Actors began wearing make up more frequently as did the elite. Elizabeth I herself was infamous for her milk-white skin. Make up became more sociably acceptable among the rich and noble at this point.

The 1700s probably saw the height of make up madness. Both women and men of the elite powdered themselves with white lead paint. They rouged their cheeks to high pigment and stuck small dots of felt to cover blemishes. The commons began to poke fun at the elite's strange obsession with looking like they've lost all their blood. Dandies and painted noblewomen were often poked fun at by pamphlets and satirical cartoons.

The Victorians frowned on make up, thinking it garish and common. Queen Victoria herself denounced make up as uncouth which lead the elite to abandon it in droves. However, most women prized a clear complexion so there was a lot of secret make-up-ing going on.

During the Edwardian period and the 1920s, make up began to get more popular. Older more respectable women began trying makeup to fresh their complexion. The younger generations began to experiment with makeup leading to the infamous smokey eye look.

El sexo es el juego más simple que existe, para ser razonables, es el más sencillo. La metes y la sacas, lo sacas y lo metes, sube y baja, baja y sube, media vuelta y otra vuelta, no hay árbitro, aficionados echando porras (a menos que sea una despedida de soltero), no hay marcador, puntos, pero siempre, y por decisión de ambos, en la mayoría de los casos, se llega a tiempo extra. Otra de las ventajas del juego es que no necesita uniformes, cascos (bueno, de vez en cuando de látex), zapatos especiales o señalamientos. Es el único juego donde nadie gana, a no ser que uno de los dos terminé muy pronto y no esté dispuesto a ayudar a su contrincante a empatar. Luego de practicarlo un tiempo muchos tienen la idea de que para hacerlo más interesante hay que ir poniendo reglas, como:

¿Nos vemos antes para salir a cenar?

¿Pasas por mí después del trabajo?

Llevar un detalle antes del encuentro

Comenzar a contar intimidades

Hablar de planes a futuro

Prometerse amor para no sentirse tan insensibles

Comparar virtudes inventadas con otros competidores para demostrar quién tiene el mejor juego

Y cuando un juego se llena de reglas, se vuelve un sistema, y lo sabemos, todos andamos huyendo de los sistemas.

El libro tinto para charlar con el que no vino, Quetzal Noah

“Me hiciste sentir luminosa, como si yo tuviera un poder que ni yo misma reconozco, como si dentro de mí estuvieran todas las respuestas, como cuando miras un cuadro y el corazón se estremece entre la felicidad, tristeza y asombro. No puedo privarte de las palabras maravillosas que te salen, sin embargo, yo no me siento como todo eso que tú logras ver en mí. No puedo cortar tus alas, pero no puedo volar contigo, déjame aquí, tengo un montón de pedos en la cabeza, un desmadre constante que me desequilibra, que me derrumba, me arroja cuando creo estar bien y ya tengo suficiente conmigo misma como para soportarlo. Por favor, no romantices la insistencia, escribe un poema que te sane de esto si es necesario. No entiendas nada de lo que te digo como una oportunidad para sanarme, no permitas que tu ego te haga creer que yo estaría mejor de tu lado. Estoy bien, aunque no todo el tiempo me siento suficiente he ido aprendiendo a bastarme con lo que soy.”

— Mágico y ebrio, Quetzal Noah (via quetzalnoah)

Celebrate Earth Day with some cosmic perspective brought to you by NASA and Carl Sagan

“That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.

On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

-Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

VISUAL PROCESS 1 by sculptor, Serge Jupin.