From the still room to the laboratory
For most of history the person who made your face cream was you, or somebody in your household. The shift to industrial manufacture was also a shift in who held the knowledge.
Cosmetic manufacture moved through four overlapping stages: household production from manuscript receipt books, apothecary and perfumer production under guild oversight, nineteenth century chemical manufacture using industrial materials, and twentieth century corporate laboratory formulation. The decisive change was not chemical but social. Recipes moved from shared domestic knowledge that circulated in handwriting into trade secrets and patents held by firms, and the buyer stopped being a maker.
There is a room in a certain kind of English country house that visitors walk past without much thought. It is small, stone floored, north facing, fitted with shelves and a hearth, and it is labelled the still room. It was a manufacturing facility. In it, distillations were run, waters and spirits drawn off, ointments compounded, syrups boiled, cordials bottled and cosmetics made. It was usually the responsibility of the mistress of the house or a senior servant answerable to her, and it produced medicine, preserves, cleaning agents and face preparations without distinguishing sharply between them.
The receipt book
The evidence for what went on there is unusually good, because people wrote it down. Manuscript receipt books, compiled over years and often across generations, survive in large numbers in research libraries and archives. They are a genuinely underrated historical source and they are wonderfully undisciplined: a remedy for a cough sits above a method for cleaning lace, which sits above a pomade for the hair, which sits above a way of keeping cherries. Attribution is common and specific, in the form of a name attached to a recipe, which reveals a circulating network of exchange between households, largely female, operating entirely outside print.
The cosmetic entries in these books are practical rather than aspirational. Waters for the complexion, distilled from flowers or from bran. Pomatum, which is fat, usually lard or marrow, melted and scented and used on skin and hair. Washes involving lemon, vinegar, wine, alum, borax or lead. Powders of starch, orris root and, again, lead. Lip salves of wax and oil coloured with alkanet root, which yields a red. Almond based cleansers. Preparations for removing freckles and tan, which appear so frequently across so many collections that the desire to be pale was clearly not confined to any one class or century.
The apothecary and the perfumer
Alongside domestic production ran a trade. In European cities, the making and selling of scented and medicinal preparations fell under guild structures, with the boundaries between grocers, apothecaries, perfumers, glovers and physicians contested and periodically litigated. The reason glovers appear in that list is worth a moment: leather gloves were scented to mask the smell of the tanning process, which made glovers dealers in perfume, which in some cities made them a cosmetics trade by another name.
Guild oversight did something regulation would later do badly for a long time: it set standards of composition and gave a customer somebody to complain to. It also restricted entry, protected knowledge and kept prices up. Nobody should romanticise it. But the transition out of guild control into an open market of proprietary preparations, over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, removed a check without replacing it, which is a large part of why the nineteenth century is the great age of the dangerous patent nostrum.
Industrial chemistry arrives
Three nineteenth century developments changed cosmetic manufacture more than anything in the previous thousand years.
Petroleum. The refining of crude oil produced, among its by products, a group of soft waxy fractions. Petroleum jelly and liquid paraffin gave formulators a cheap, stable, non rancid, essentially inert base. Before this, cosmetic bases were animal fats and vegetable oils, all of which go off. The arrival of a base that does not spoil is the single most consequential technical event in the history of skin preparations, and it is almost never mentioned.
Synthetic organic chemistry. The coal tar dye industry, which began in Britain in the 1850s, produced a stream of new colours and, crucially, new aroma chemicals. Coumarin, with its sweet hay scent, was synthesised in 1868 by William Henry Perkin. Vanillin followed in the 1870s. These changed what a perfumer could do, and they are the subject of a separate essay.
Emulsion science. Getting oil and water to stay mixed is the central problem of cream making. Nineteenth and early twentieth century work on emulsifiers, and the industrial availability of stearates, borax and later a wide range of surfactants, turned an unreliable domestic art into a reproducible process. A cream that separates in the jar is not a product. A cream that does not is.
The most important thing the twentieth century put into face cream was not an active ingredient. It was stability.
- The claim
- Cleopatra, or Nefertiti, or the ladies of the Roman court, used a face cream essentially identical to modern cold cream, and the recipe has come down to us unchanged.
- Where it appears to come from
- Cold cream is genuinely ancient in principle, and the tradition attributes an early formulation to Galen in the second century, a preparation of wax, oil and water sometimes called Galen's cerate. That attribution is old and reasonably well founded. The extension of it to specific named figures of the ancient world, and the claim of an unbroken identical recipe, is marketing copy that has escaped into general circulation.
- What is actually established
- Established: an emulsion of beeswax, oil and water, with a cooling effect on evaporation, is described in the classical medical tradition and attributed to Galen. Established: the same principle underlies cold cream as later made. Not established: any specific ancient individual's personal use of it, or continuity of a single recipe. The modern product is stabilised with materials that did not exist before the nineteenth century, and the resemblance is one of category, not of formula.
Who owns the recipe now
The deepest change is not in the chemistry but in the epistemics. In the receipt book world, knowledge of how to make a cosmetic was distributed, copied, annotated and given away. It was attached to named women who had shared it. There was no reason to conceal it, because nobody was selling it.
Industrial manufacture inverted that. A formula became an asset, protected by patent where patenting was worthwhile and by secrecy where it was not, and the customer's relationship to it became one of trust rather than knowledge. Ingredient labelling, which is now mandatory in Britain and the European Union and lists constituents in descending order of quantity under an international nomenclature, is the partial restoration of something that was lost. It tells you what is in the jar. It does not tell you how to make it, and it was never intended to.
The commercial consequences of that shift, and the strange legal history of trying to own a formula, are taken up in the essay on secret recipes and patents. The regulatory consequences run through the colour additive story. And the reason so much of the domestic tradition survives at all is that women wrote it down in books nobody thought were important, which is a point that recurs whenever this magazine goes looking for a source.
Where to look
Readers who want to go further should start with the holdings themselves rather than with summaries of them. The Wellcome Collection and the British Library both publish catalogue and research material relevant to this article. Both links are given for reference only. Neither institution has been assessed by us, neither has any connection to this magazine, and nothing here is an endorsement of any organisation.
Questions readers send us
What is a still room?
A room in a substantial household given over to distilling, compounding and preserving. It produced medicines, cordials, preserves, cleaning preparations and cosmetics, and was normally under the direction of the woman of the house. Surviving examples and reconstructions can be seen at a number of historic properties in Britain.
What is a receipt book?
A manuscript compilation of recipes in the broad older sense: instructions for making anything. They typically mix food, medicine, household chemistry and cosmetics, are added to over decades, and often credit the person who supplied each entry. Large numbers survive in research library collections.
When did cosmetics manufacture become industrial?
Gradually across the nineteenth century, accelerating sharply from the 1880s onwards as petroleum derived bases, synthetic aroma chemicals, reliable emulsifiers and mass packaging came together. The recognisable modern industry, with brands, advertising and national distribution, is a phenomenon of roughly the last hundred and twenty years.
Why does petroleum jelly matter so much in this story?
Because it does not go rancid. Every earlier cosmetic base was an animal fat or a vegetable oil and had a short life. A stable, cheap, inert base made shelf life possible, and shelf life made distribution possible, and distribution made brands possible.
Are old recipes safe to make at home?
Many are not. Historical cosmetic recipes routinely include lead, mercury, arsenic and other substances now prohibited in cosmetics, and even the benign ones lack any preservative system. Read them as documents rather than as instructions.
- Wellcome Collection Major holdings of manuscript receipt books and the history of pharmacy and domestic medicine.
- British Library Manuscript and printed household books, trade literature and early chemical texts.
- Science Museum Group History of chemistry, pharmacy and industrial manufacture.
- Victoria and Albert Museum Material culture of the household, including still room and toilet equipment.
- Royal Historical Society Scholarship on domestic economy, guilds and early modern trade.
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