Make-up: A Glamorous History, review: ever dismissed make-up as frivolous? Think again

“Makeup can be seen as a frivolous subject,” says Lisa Eldridge. “But I think it’s hugely important. What we believe to be beautiful is a window on the world we’re living in.” As a professional make-up artist and Global Creative Director for Lanc?me, Eldridge has a lot of painted skin in the game. But, over the course of this three-part series, she raises scholarly spectacles over her smokey eyes and proves an illuminating guide through the evolution of facial fashion, from the early 18th century up to the Thirties.

There are three hour-long episodes. The first, which aired tonight, covered the decadent Georgians (toxic white face paint and Kerplunk up-dos ); the second tackles the Victorians (when a woman’s “natural beauty” was believed to spring from her inner virtue) and the third covers the revolution of the roaring Twenties, when women lopped off their long hair and Coco Chanel advised: “If you’re sad, apply more lipstick and attack.”

In an interview with makeup.com last year, Eldridge traced her own fascination with cosmetics back to early childhood. Aged six, she found a box of her mother’s old make-up at her grandmother’s house. “It was full of incredible Sixties make-up – Mary Quant crayons, Coty lipsticks, Elizabeth Arden eyeshadows – and it was so glamorous. I was initially captivated by the shiny colours, gloopy gloss textures, smell and the objects themselves. I wasn’t really interested in putting them on my own face. Instead, I liked painting and drawing with them. My regular Crayola crayons seemed boring by comparison.”

On screen, Eldridge really sells her sensory delight in the products and her curiosity about what they meant to the women of the past. She trawls through the history books and recreated products we haven’t used for decades. There are recipes with crushed beetles, seashells and bear grease (which she substituted with a vegetable oil). She tests them out first on herself and then on a young model called Queenie – who balanced Eldridge's enthusiasm with an endearing teenage scepticism. There are more bursts of unconvinced laughter from pharmacist Szu Shen Wong, drafted in to make the more tricky or toxic products in her lab.

If YouTube has taught us anything it’s that people can’t get enough of cookery and make-up tutorials. This series combines the soothing, alchemical pleasures of both. We watch Eldridge grind up her ingredients in a pestle and mortar and sieve them through muslin into gorgeous vintage bowls. Then we watched her brush, smear and – in some cases – glue her retro potions onto Queenie’s fresh, flawless young face.

The Georgian episode includes the series’ high watermark of shock horror when Eldridge opens a pretty little box and extracts an authentic pair of mangy, mouse-hide eyebrows. “Eughhh! Bleug-hurgh! Horrible. Hideous,” she splutters before cautiously popping them onto her petite, alabaster face. They make the modern “Sharpie brow” look subtle by comparison. The more appealing Georgian alternative was a burned clove, which actually gave Eldridge a great smokey effect. I checked up by trying it myself and can confirm that the singed spice made my house smell great and it really did make a great, natural and easily-blendable brow darkener.

Of course, to modern eyes, the Georgian look might be ravishingly beautiful but was insanely time consuming. That was the point. Only the very richest could afford the time and products and this was a period of staggering inequality. Eldridge travelled to Chatsworth House in Derbyshire to skim through Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire’s accounts. There she learned the Duchess’s hairdresser was paid the equivalent of ￡100,000 per year. The excess of the period ended with Marie Antoinette’s head lifted by its pomaded pomp for a Republican crowd: her executioner is said to have taken some of her hair away in his pocket.

Feminist issues arise in next week's Victorian episode. Eldridge is scathing about the (ongoing) social pressure on women to look beautiful while pretending the effect is all natural. She describes it as the era of “sneaky makeup”, looking at the household tricks that women achieved to create “virtuous” blushes and wholesome glossy eyebrows (castor oil). It was a hypocritical culture that forced women into covert trickery as a means of demonstrating their goodness. And we still live in the Victorian shadow on this score. Eldridge reveals that “the natural look” is one of the most time consuming styles for her to achieve and it usually takes her over 45 minutes of painstaking dabbing and brushing to make a young fashion model look “effortlessly” beautiful.

The final episode is a blast of colour and fun as Eldridge celebrates the women who celebrated their new status in the wake of the First World War. We get to gawp at the first movie stars and drown in the kohl-rimmed eyes of Theda Barra. We learn how Max Factor created a "flexible greasepaint” for Hollywood stars and quickly began marketing it to a public determined to get the look worn by stars like Clara Bow. We also see how the celebrity of Josephine Baker began to change views on black beauty. Although, a century later, black women are still underrepresented in the fashion industry; two years ago, I interviewed comedian London Hughes who told me that a television make-up artist once tried to cover her face in cocoa powder.

It’s shame this series ends in 1930 instead of coming up to date. A lot more changed through the 20th century and Eldridge leaves the story before the invention of liquid mascara. After the Forties, make-up went from being an act of feminist rebellion to a daily duty as Helena Rubinstein declared: “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.” These days it’s still a divisive topic. A 2019 study suggested that the average British woman spends ￡2.39 per day on make-up and toiletries, which adds up to ￡16.73 a week and ￡872.35 a year. Twenty-one per cent of us spend under five minutes on make-up each day, with 48 per cent spending five-to-15 minutes and 31 per cent between 15 and 30 minutes. As many feminists point out, that’s a lot of time and money.

But viewers of this programme are likely to feel seduced by the transformative luxury of the make-up process. I’ll definitely continue rocking my burned-clove eyes. And I might even have a go at making my own tinted lip balm, sneaky Victorian style. But I’m also happy to let whole weeks fly by with nothing but soap and moisturiser. Because, as Eldridge concludes, make-up can be both “a joy and a tyranny”.