I came across this in The Lady’s Monthly Museum, 1 April 1800. I present it copied verbatim:
Proposals for opening
A Register-Office for Beauty:
Or, Repository for Female Charms
Mr Editor,
Through the medium of your excellent and widely-circulated
Museum, I beg leave to state, that I have procured, with infinite labour and
expense, the choicest collection of all the several articles required for
mending, patching, restoring, improving, and supplying every female perfection.
I have also engaged the most ingenious artists in the different branches of
this useful profession, and mean shortly to open an office at the Court end of
the town.
I have provided all the different assortment of lilies and
roses, to suit every complexion. I have laid in a considerable stock of
unguents, cosmetics, and beautifying pastes. I have the finest tinctures to
colour the hair, the brightest red salve for foul lips, and the sweetest
perfumes for stinking breaths. I shall sell Mr. ---’s fine compound (at a
guinea an ounce), to take off all superfluous hair, without the least prejudice
to the tenderest complexion; as likewise the grand anti-maculating tincture, to
remove pimples, sun-burns, or freckles.
I have various shapes ready fitted up, of all sizes; with
all sorts of cushions, plumpers, and bolsters, to hide any defects. I have a
curiously-contrived engine for pulling out wry necks, for strengthening bandy
legs, and for stretching or cramping them, with the feet, arms, hands, etc, if too
short, or too long. I also have a machine for reducing crooked backs, or
flattening round shoulders.
I have artificial brilliants of all waters, whether for the
bright eye, the dead eye, the piercing eye, the sleepy eye, the bold eye, the
swimming eye, etc. I have hired a French oculist to put them into any ladies’
sockets, from whence he will take out, with very little pain, the squinny eye,
the wall eye, the goggle eye, and all others. Hairs are plucked out of the
forehead by pincers, and the smoothest mouse eye-brows, of all colours, put on
by him in their room, with the nicest exactness.
Mr ----, the dentist, has engaged to draw teeth at my
office, and to put in a new set of the best polished ivory. A noted chin-turner
will attend every day, to shave, plane, and mount chins, to any cock desired;
he will also neatly piece, join, and glue on artificial ones, if wanted.
I have imported a great-grand-daughter of professor Taliacotius, who pares, scrapes, grinds, and new-models overgrown
noses; cuts off crooked or flat ones to the stumps, and engrafts new ones on
the roots of them.
I apply a particular sticking-plaster to the face, which
takes off the whole skin; I then rub it over with a beautfying liquor, which
adds a new gloss to it; and afterwards I paint it, as natural as the life, to
any pattern of complexion. I peel off the finger-nails, and flay the entire
hand in the same manner, which, in a month’s time, makes them as white as
hanging them in a sling, or the wearing of dog’s skin gloves can render them in
a twelvemonth. As for those who are hindered from dancing, by corns of any
sort, or toe-nails grown into the flesh, a most famous corn-doctor has promised
to cure them; as (according to his advertisement) several of the Royal Family,
and a great many persons of the highest distinction, have experienced.
I cut dimples into the grain, which never wear out. I slit
the lips open on each side if too narrow, and sew them up when they are too
wide, with such niceness, that the seams are imperceptible. I no less
dexterously fine-draw, or darn, wrinkles of any standing; and fill up all dents,
chaps, or holes made by the small-pox, with a new-invented powder. I have a
thin diet-drink to bring down the over-plump to a proper gentility of slimness,
and a nourishing kind of jelly for the improvement of the scraggy. In short, I
am possessed of many other equally valuable secrets, on which I shall enlarge
more particularly hereafter, in my printed bills, to be dispersed over the
three kingdoms.
Ladies are waited upon at their own houses, by their very
humble servant,
Elizabeth Mendall.
There are a number of things in this text worthy of comment,
but what I find most difficult is to trace the exact line separating the
possibly accurate from the satirical. It’s not easy: women did sleep in dogskin
gloves which sealed their hands in a paste to whiten them; hairs were plucked
off foreheads, and plumpers filled out the spaces in the mouth where lost teeth
would otherwise cause sunken cheeks. So, in my quest for evidence of mouse-skin
false eye-brows, should I treat this as a viable documentary text, or a satire?
It is a very late mention for this particular cosmetic fashion – references to
mouse-skin eye-brows tend to be mid-eighteenth century. My gut feeling is that I
should treat it as satire, one more for a growing collection of satirical
references to this phenomenon, for which I have as yet to find one
non-satirical reference.
A
further thought though: where does the expression ‘mousy hair’ really come
from?
