Part I: Toxic Beauty
The Life and Death colours of makeup
Maybe you noticed that there was no newsletter last week. January hit hard. Plus I had a kind of complicated story to tell. A story that is particularly close to my heart, and to my researches into meaning-based natural colour. The story begins with a radioactive swimming pool in Hamilton, passes through ancient Egypt, the Vietnam war, a volcano-protected ochre sanctuary in the Pacific Northwest, a Zoom call while trapped at the JFK Covid Hotel, and ends up (finally), in my old studio talking to its extraordinary new inhabitant. I hope you will read on. And please do subscribe or share. JL
Toxic Beauty
“What is there that is not poison? All things are poison and nothing is without poison. Solely the dose determines that a thing is not a poison,” —Paracelsus
Last summer, I found myself behind a lead-lined bank-vault-style circular door accompanied by a film crew and two physicists on a bridge overlooking a pool glowing from deep below, with the eerie blue light of a radioactive core used for cancer treatment and the analysis of historical pigments. Neutrons emitted from the reactor would give the archeologist I was meeting insight into the interlocked role of prehistoric campfires, minerals, and iron-eating microbial colonies in transforming rock into a deep red paint used as symbolic way-finding for an indigenous community in British Columbia. That day was to be a scene in the upcoming documentary, The Colour of Ink, and while the footage might end up on the cutting room floor, it introduced me to two unforgettable scientists: Dr. Brandi MacDonald and Dr. Fiona McNeill.
Dr. MacDonald, who was the reason for our visit, studies prehistoric rock art by bringing together physics, chemistry, archeology, and indigenous communities. Dr. McNeill runs a lab at McMaster for the Radiation Sciences Graduate Program and was once Dr. MacDonald’s thesis advisor, mentor, and champion.
While the filmmakers were interviewing Dr. MacDonald, I found myself fascinated by Dr. McNeill and the extraordinary lab she runs beside the McMaster Nuclear Reactor. The lab is a maze of wires, 3D-printed anatomical test-mice, mechanical prototypes, measuring tools, medical devices, and mysterious samples. She is a discipline-crossing scientist who combines physics, material science, history, chemistry, anthropology, biology, and mining, to ask unexpected questions of our world. Dr. McNeill’s lab also supports a team of mostly female scientists whose research seems to tunnel through all kinds of departments at the university.
Dr. McNeill’s official research program is to build biomedical devices for painless, low risk assessment of toxic metals in people, but what she is most famous for investigating is the mysterious death of Lady Coventry, an 18th Century socialite who was thought to have been poisoned by the lead in her fashionably white makeup. Dr. McNeill and her team are combining radiography, chemistry, social history, and even shopping at Sephora for various shades of foundation, to learn something about lead and history and in the process they are questioning a few time-honoured patriarchal assumptions about makeup. Their blog is called Toxic Allure. I know from my own researches that many of the best historical pigment recipes contain toxic heavy metals. (I’m thinking of you Cinnabar, Scheele’s Green, and Cadmium Red.) And while the inhalation of toxins from lead in paint continues to be a serious issue, makeup rarely gets a full scientific examination. A nuanced look at both our definitions of beauty and our definitions of poison is long overdue. And this closer look doesn’t work with a binary view of toxicity or beauty. To paraphrase my friend Brian (Director of The Colour of Ink), and Paracelsus (the father of toxicology), we should not be focused on good or bad but on dosage.
McNeill’s team’s specialization is on the subtle gradations of toxicity. They are very alert to the way that lead slowly builds up in the human body. They are also alert to an ongoing patriarchal bias: scientists, historians, and commentators felt free (then as now) to judge women for wearing “too much” makeup. In fact, lead, while toxic inside the body, is barely absorbed though the skin and moralizing makeup as an inessential, frivolous, or even dangerous luxury, is patriarchal, bad science, and misses the many powers of cosmetics.
Medicinal Beauty
The jury is still out about what killed Lady Coventry and there is a whole other story to be told about ‘whiteness’ and beauty. What stuck with me was this problematic and enduring notion that women are risking their lives for beauty. Dr. McNeill mentioned to me, in passing, a new study of the Egyptian’s use of lead-based kohl. I looked it up and kohl is a fascinating substance in the history of handmade colour. Again it has been assumed by historians that this famous Cleopatrian eye-defining makeup was a poison that women naively endured for the sake of beauty and power. If the famous bust of Neferetti is any indication, kohl may have been worth a bit of lead poisoning for Queen of the 18th dynasty of ancient Egypt. Neferneferuaten Nefertiti (c. 1370 – c. 1330 BC) whose name translated into English means, “The Beautiful Woman has Come,” co-led a religious revolution, sported a look that was between the genders, and may have taken over from her husband as sole leader of the richest period of Ancient Egyptian history.
There is something compelling about the narrative of power coming at price. But the recent materially grounded research that Dr. McNeill referenced has complicated the picture. While kohl did contain toxins, the heavy black pigment worked much like a football player’s eyeblack to improve eyesight under bright sunlight. At the same time the galena, a lead-based ore responsible for the deep black colour, stimulated an immune response that made kohl an important anti-bacterial agent against the eye infections common to the swampy Nile Valley. It was doing a few things at the same time.
A look at the cosmetic boxes, makeup palettes, and elaborate cases for eye makeup found among the belongings of the tombs of ancient Egyptians point to a reverence for makeup that goes beyond what we think of as cosmetic. The archeology suggests that ancient Egyptians regarded beauty as a sign of holiness and that makeup was a significant tool that allowed both men and women to combine medicine, ritual, aesthetics, power and magic in a single medium. So makeup, like natural ink, brings together colour and meaning.
All of this was on my mind when a colourful, powerful, medicinal, death-born rock found its way into my hands… READ ON (next Friday).
Fascinating exploration of Terrible Beauty.. hooked!!
Leaving us hanging....