Hello, my beautiful doves. My name is Mina and I'm going to be your host for today. So I kind of wanted to talk about
something more historical for this video, because I feel like my last couple videos
have been more modern, or 20th Century based, and... Yeah, I just like, I haven't
done something older in a while, so I thought for this video, we could take it back to
the roots of this channel, just for fun. As some of you know,
I am a maximalist, and so it should be to no one's surprise that the mid to late 18th Century
is one of my favorite fashion eras of all time. And I also want an excuse to wear this wig again. Anyways, as I was racking my brain, trying to think of a topic to do,
focused on the 18th Century, I thought, "why not beauty marks?" You know, the little applied mole, along with rouge and white face powder
that feels synonymous with Marie Antoinette's makeup routine. But, in actuality, as I was
reading more about these patches, or as they call them
in France, 'mouches', which means "flies", they were actually introduced
at the end of the 16th Century, became commonplace by the 1640s, and then rose to the height of their absurdity
in the second half of the 17th Century. So, actually, we're going to take
it back a little bit further today and so, maybe, the poof is
not that relevant, but... Whatever! Let's get into it! To be more specific,
a mouche is a patch, commonly made of velvet,
taffeta, silk or satin. The most favorite color was black,
but you could also get mouches in red, green, purple or blue. If you were but a lonely commoner
and still wanted to participate in the trend, then your patches would probably be
homemade and constructed of mouse skin. Yes, French cultural historian,
Daniel Roach has found evidence that poor workers chose to still
participate in the consumer economy. Some poor people even gave
up household necessities, like pots and pans,
so that they could afford clothes, mirrors and/or cosmetics. And, in general, poor people tended to
wear lighter makeup than richer people. Aileen Ribeiro, author of
"Facing Beauty", painted women in cosmetic art, further validates this saying that
the patch trend was particularly affordable for all women of the
17th and 18th Centuries. However, she says that your status was
reflected by the number of patches you wore and the placement of those
patches on your face. But there was still a fine line
that you had to walk on, and it's still not clear
what that fine line was. I think it really differed depending
on the region and, of course, the time. Like, year by year. Generally, if you wore too many,
you could come off as desperate; and if you were too few,
you were 'passé'. Frenchman Henri Masson noted in 1719: "The Use of Patches is not
unknown to the French ladies; "but she that wears them
must be young and handsome. "In England, young, old, handsome ugly
all are bepatch'd until Bed-rid. "I've often counted 15 Patches, "or more upon the swarthy wrinkled face
of an old Hag threescore and 10, and upwards". During the 18th Century,
the patch trend slowly went into decline. Obviously, women were still wearing them, hence why we associate the beauty
mole with 18th Century so heavily, but there was a common rhetoric
being spread around that, if you wore too many,
you were gaudy or immoral. It's important to remember that smallpox and
syphilis was still widespread at this time, because we have not
yet discovered penicillin; and both these diseases left major scarring
on your face and in other parts of your body. So, if you were lucky,
and you only had a mild case, then you could cover up the leftover
scarring with these little beauty patches. - I love her beauty mark so much. I used to pencil one on, you know? And then, I'd move it around,
whenever I had a blemish, so... You know, it'd be here
and then it'd be here, and then sometimes
it'd be here and here. But because syphilis was a venereal disease, AKA STI, writers and artists pushed this
association between wearing patches and "being loose". But we'll get to that later. There's also a code of conduct
for wearing these patches: If you put one on your forehead,
it indicated dignity. If you put one around your lips,
it was very coquettish. If you were a betrothed young woman, you would put a heart-shaped
patch on your left cheek; and after getting married,
you would switch to the right. There were also different names
for these mouches, depending on where you put them on your face. A mouche on the forehead
was called an "assassin", and one on the cheek,
was called a "galante". You could also wear them on places
like your shoulder or your neck. It wasn't just limited to the face. Mouches originated in France,
hence the name, but spread all throughout Europe. Attitudes towards cosmetics, though,
just vary naturally by region. A review of portraiture shows that English
women wore less makeup than French women, but by the 1770s, both groups
of women wore about the same. And then, by the 1780s, the heavy makeup
look was just declining in general, because the natural look was coming in vogue. These mouches were decorative
to create contrast and highlight the "ghostlyness" of one's skin. They would also draw attention
to certain features of the face, like the eyes. As an example of attitudes at the time,
in Antoine Le Camus' 'Abdeker or the Art of Preserving Beauty',
published in 1754, Abdeker says, after seeing a fly
land on Fatima's beautiful face: "I think its Blackness sets off
the Lustre of the Vermillion "and makes your Eye look
more lively and amorous". According to fashion historian,
Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell: "A lot of early writers said
patches were an imitation of Venus, "who supposedly had a mole on her cheek. "She had this one imperfection
that made her even more beautiful, "and the patches were supposedly imitating that". Mouches were stuck to the face with a
gummy like substance called "mastic", which is a type of resin. It's easy to stick on
and easy to remove, so these were like actual patches. It wasn't just like, these eyeliner
moles that I've put on my face today. Patches in general also ranged in size. There's documentation from a perfumer, which is, basically, what they called
someone who sold beauty products; and this perfumer put in an order for patches as small as a pea size to as
large as the size of a half dollar coin. One person in the 1700s,
wrote dramatically: "It is with great sorrow that I
already see it in the possession "of that beautiful mass of blue
which borders upon the eye. "Should it increase on the
side of that exquisite feature, "what an eclipse have we to dread!" I've read a lot of books and articles
saying that these patches could be cut into different shapes, like stars, crescents... Even a horse-drawn carriage. But I am skeptical about the carriage, just because it's really hard for
me to imagine like, a whole carriage on someone's face. Also because all the references
people use to cite this information came from satirical papers
or from critics, who could just have been using hyperbole. Just based on portraiture, I feel like everything that I've seen
has just been very simple shapes. The mouches were often carried
or stored in small decorated patch boxes, called "fly boxes",
in France. The boxes also sometimes
contained an internal mirror and a small brush to help
with the mouche reapplication. Mouches are also not to be
mistaken for "medicinal patches". I came across this amazing article called: "Revising the Visage:
Patches and Beauty Spots "in Seventeenth-Century
British and Dutch Portraits". And in it, the writer, Karen Hearn,
says that in 2009, Tate's London Gallery was cleaning up a portrait painted
by the English painter Cornelius Johnson, at their Tate painting conservation studios, while doing so, they saw that there
was a layer of overpaint that was applied significantly later than
the date of the original painting. By the way, the painting is a
portraiture of a Dutch woman and is dated roughly from 1659. The cleaning uncovered this large oval
black shape on the side of the woman's face. We can guess that probably,
whoever acquired this painting later, was disturbed by the large
black mass on this woman's face and had it covered. So, what could this gigantic patch be? Because it looks way too monstrous
in size to be just a beauty mark. There are two major theories for this: One theory suggests that the lady was
concealing a major physical imperfection, like a scar or something... But, the other theory,
I'm personally more partial to, in a medicinal text,
published in 1682 by George Hartman, he suggested that applying a black
patch called a "plaister", in this case, to the temple area could alleviate headaches,
toothaches and migraines. Hearn says that there are a number of
other Dutch female painted portraits from the mid-1600s that feature patches
at the same location on the left temple, suggesting that the use of patches to treat
headaches was widely practiced in the Netherlands. Another interesting related,
but not related point is that, N.F. Lowe, in their essay: "The Meaning of Venereal Disease
in Hogarth's Graphic Art" says that the treatment for smallpox
was often mercury-based. Mercury could be mixed with turpentine
to create this brown or black powder and then it would be applied to the sore. And that could resemble a beauty spot. So, what I'm trying to say is that, not all of these black patches depicted
in artwork were there for beauty purposes, or were mouches,
like they're kind of different things. But they could cross over,
like I said before. If you just had leftover scarring,
and it was like, a really small scar, then you could put a mouche over it and it would be like, killing
two birds with one stone. Because we live in a society black patches meant different things
when worn on different groups of people. Let's start with the men. In the 17th and 18th Centuries,
cosmetics were unisex. So that not only included mouches,
but rouge, white face paint and wigs as well. But today we're only talking about patches. Something that I found interesting
is that, when on men, certain black patches
indicated the wearer's heroism. For instance, in around 1638,
court administrator Henry Danvers commissioned a painting featuring
a crescent-shaped patch on his cheek. Danvers was a soldier and was shot
in the face in Ireland in 1599, and Hearns suggests that the patch acted as a permanent means of reminding
others of his demonstrable valor. Another man, Henry Bennett
wore an inverted v-shaped patch. However, his injury was in a minor skirmish,
nothing too brave or patriotic, but according to the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography, Bennett was "prone to emphasizing
his contribution to the royal cause "by placing a black plaster over the scar,
to the amusement of many satirists". From what I read,
there was not really like, any indication that suggested that
black patches could ever be read negatively when on a man's face. - Hello, everyone. So, I want to make a small correction, because I do want to clarify
that I did come across some art putting men in a negative light
for contracting syphilis and they were drawn with black patches
on their face to signify the syphilis, but still 99% of the time, it was the women they
contracted the disease from. That were clearly demonized the most, but... Yeah, I just want to point that out. There was a phenomenon of young
British elite men called "macaronis", who were often parodied and ridiculed by
the media for dressing very ostentatiously, spending lavishly, being unpatriotic for embracing French fashions, and veering too effeminately
among other transgressions. But the macaronis were made fun of
because of their overall presentation. So, yes, well they probably
did wear mouches, because that was in vogue. I didn't come across anything that suggested that
the mouches affected how they were represented. If anything it was their towering
wigs that drew up the most stigma. Women, of course,
can't do anything without being insulted. Surprise, surprise. So, naturally, there were a lot of
critics who disapproved of mouches. The English puritans, for instance,
disapproved of them heavily. They disapproved of cosmetics in general,
but, you know, what didn't the puritans hate? The author of
'The Gentlewoman's Companion', Hannah Woolley, was another person
to criticize the fashion. She wrote:
"It is a riddle to me, "that a blemish should appear grace,
a deformity be esteemed a beauty". Another example we have
is this cartoon from a 1652 paper, which depicts a woman labeled "virtue",
covering her hair and neck. The woman under the word "vice" is bearing
cleavage and wearing a number of patches. Some people could only associate the
beauty marks with covering up blemishes, which, of course, is not
that flattering of a reminder. Samuel Pepys observed
'Lady Castlemaine', at a London theater in May 1668. He wrote that she applied a little
patch on the side of her mouth saying: "I suppose she's feeling
a pimple arising there". This illustration was an
18th Century satirical trope, depicting an older woman
applying modern makeup and covering her imperfections
with multiple patches. You can see she's holding
her little patch box in her hand. Perry Emerson notes that the illustration
pokes fun at the idea that this woman is still trying to make herself beautiful by participating in these
fashion trends for the youth, while being past the prime of her beauty, because, of course! Old women are never supposed to be fashionable and they're not supposed to wear anything nice or participate in any makeup trends. They're just supposed to be old. Now, another pretty insidious trope,
which I kind of briefly touched upon earlier was the symbolism of patches
as representing sexual immorality. As I said earlier, syphilis
was a rampant venereal disease, until the introduction of penicillin. And because it was a venereal disease,
of course, sex workers were stereotyped as being the major victims or carriers
of the disease. The painter William Hogarth
was particularly a freak, dedicated an entire series of paintings
called 'A Harlot's Progress', which told the fictional story
of the beautiful Moll Hackabout, who becomes a Harlot and then dies of
a venereal disease at the age of 23. And we can tell that the patches drawn on here. We're not just cosmetic details, because if we take a look
at his other painting, strolling actresses in a barn,
the girls have delicate small mooches below their right eyes,
they are all identically placed And the youthful environment suggests
that these moles are beauty moles. However, the black patches he
draws on the sex workers faces are large and ill-positioned,
suggesting that they are not cosmetic, but hiding signs of syphilis.
Also, in 'A Harlot's Progress', Moll is given more and more
patches leading up to her death. There were also some writers
who partook in this trope of "loose woman" wearing patches. The court satire
on several women about town. Includes the lines, was a bouncing
widow with a patch on her nose who loves fucking better the older she grows. Writers at the time also claimed you could
identify whether or not a woman was a sex worker, based on how many patches
she was wearing. Aileen Ribeiro says: "The problem arose when lower-class
women used too many patches. "Such beauty spots signified not merely a
language of sexual coquetry, but sexual license", which I think is very INTERESTING that Ribeiro highlights a lower
class woman in that sentence. Sentences, because I did read a guide
written on 18th Century French customs. I think it's like, a shaky source,
because, even though, it was written by a curator of the Imperial
library of the Arsenal in Paris. paul lacroix, which sounds
like a very fancy title, it was also published in 1876,
which is like a hundred years after. The time period that
it's talking about and also, because it's so old--
I have trouble trusting sources that are not primary sources,
but also like super old. So, take this information with a great assault, is what I'm trying to say. This guide says that,
"a great lady always had seven or eight mouches". Seven or eight?
Just feels like a lot in your face, personally. But I guess if you're dressed like,
an upperclass lady, and you have the title to prove it. Even if you're wearing a ton of patches, people
are just going to assume you don't have syphilis, because you are rich and a lady. I think it just goes to show,
like, when looking at how men were perceived, how women were perceived,
older women, retro woman... Sex workers... These beauty patches could
contribute a lot of stereotypes, depending on your social standing; and which group you belong to? Okay, this is the end of the video. Thank you so much for joining me
on this little tour through the world of 17th and 18th Century beauty. I hope you learned something from this. I also just like, out of curiosity,
would like to know, so just leave a comment,
if you feel you can contribute to this. But I would just like to know whether most
of you prefer me talking about something. Like, newer or something older. I'm probably going to continue to do a
mix of both of these things going forward, Just out of interest so... Yeah! I hope you have a
lovely rest of your day. Thank you so much
for your time and bye bye
I couldn't give a shit about 17th century make-up fashion, but I still watched the whole video just because of how cheerfully passionate she was about the whole thing.
The s to mouches is silent.
Nailed the 18th Century Juggalo look.
learned something new today!