Sandra Cavallo has noted an “explosion in treatments for facial appearance” in the sixteenth century, as propagated by the proliferation of household recipe books – often titled “books of secrets”.

These books are full of all sorts of recipes that might be useful for the household including many for what we’d consider cosmetic use.

Some of the choicer period recipes:

• “Boil together a solution of one pint of arsenic and eighth of a pint of quicklime. Go to a baths or a hot room and smear medicine over the area to be depilated. When the skin feels hot, wash quickly with hot water so the flesh doesn’t come off.”
• Caterina Sforza’s book has such 9 recipes; including one made of pig lard, mustard and juniper, and another involving a distillation of swallows.
• Francisco Delicado’s La Lozana Andaluza, was published in Venice in 1528. In it, Lozana recounts how “By mistake we burned off all the hair from the private parts of a lady from Bologna, but we put butter on it and made her believe she was right in style”.
• Also from the 16th century, this time in Bologna comes the recipe recommending women wash the area in a mixture of cat dung and vinegar.

Via lecturer in Italian renaissance art history at the University of Edinburgh Jill Burke.