A Tudor trend for pale skin, high brows, a slightly oval face, gently flushed cheeks, and tinted lips led to the rise of some curious make-up techniques, some gross and fascinating.
The feminine beauty ideal was in essence to personify the English rose, and nobody embodied this more than Queen Elizabeth I herself. To this end various make-up techniques were devised and circulated in recipes, a phenomenon spurred on by the spread of the printing press.
Some of these methods were harmful, including arsenic skin masks, mercury lipstick, and lead skin whitener. Others were innocuous but to our eyes still quite strange. How about varnishing your face with egg whites?
Perhaps you would be even less keen on puppy juice, an Early Modern concoction as horrifying as it sounds.
“Unfortunately it’s exactly what you think it is,” explains Sally Pointer, educator and author of The Artifice of Beauty: A History and Practical Guide to Perfume and Cosmetics, who joins Professor Suzannah Lipscomb in an episode of Not Just the Tudors.
The prevailing Tudor enthusiasm for alchemy suggested that it was possible to extract the qualities of something through distillation. One of these distillations, which indicates a ruthless zeal in harvesting seemingly wholesome ingredients, was puppy dog water.
“You take a beautiful, young, soft, perfect puppy,” says Pointer. It is then (for lack of a better word) chopped up. It is then boiled. “Sadly it doesn’t survive the experience.”
Portrait of Clarissa Strozzi by Titian, 1542, where she holds her Phalène dog.
Image Credit: Public Domain
The alembic it is distilled in contained other liquids, probably wine or water. “You distil it and the water is supposed to contain all the virtues of all the things that made the puppy young and beautiful and adorable.”
The resulting water would then be used as a cosmetic toner with moisturising properties.
“This wasn’t a one-off,” says Pointer. “We have lots of references to this.”
A recipe recorded in Nicholas Culpeper’s 17th century Pharmacopoeia Londinensis instructs:
“Takes Sallet Oil four pound, two Puppy-dogs newly whelped, Earthworms washed in white Wine one pound; boil the Whelps til they fall in pieces then put in the worms a while after strain it, then with three ounces of Cypress Turpentine, and one ounce of Spirits of Wine, perfect the Oil according to Art.”
Reassuringly, not everybody was keen on the idea. The famous diarist Samuel Pepys, whose private accounts make up one of the most important historical sources for the period, records that he became upset with his wife because she tried this puppy concoction.
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