Elizabethan Cosmetic Recipe.

I have decided to chose the Tudor cosmetic 'Mercury' which was said to be used a face wash for women in the Elizabethan period. I found this use of face cleansing common in many historical books and internet sources I had looked at and the more It came up the more I became intrigued as to why they used mercury, which is commonly known as 'quicksilver', to cleanse their face with. The common reason for the use of this element has been said to be, that it acted as a cleanser and face peel

Liquid Mercury.
Google Sourced image.
http://www.swellnet.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/liquid-mercury-e1408545320177.jpg

leaving womens faces soft and new. Every source I have looked at does not explain how this metal was compressed and used as a cleanser, so I'm unsure wether it was melted and mixed and broken down, but it was mixed with oils and ointments and then applied directly to the skin. 

Historically the use of Mercury as a beauty and cosmetic product is quite common as described in this online source from the BBC Website; 

'Mercury: A beautiful but poisonous metal ' -November 30th 2013, By Justin Rowlatt, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25130770.

"Mercury's bright red ore, cinnabar, has been employed as a pigment since Neolithic times. Some 10,000 years ago, the earliest artists used it to daub pictures of aurochs, the now extinct giant wild cattle they hunted, on the walls of caves in Turkey. The Romans used it as a form of rouge make-up, and the Chinese to colour their lacquer, while in the Middle Ages the pigment was mixed with wax to provide the seals placed on formal documents. For centuries the metal was also used in medicine. Even fairly recently it was still used in antiseptics, laxatives, anti-depressants, and drugs to combat syphilis. "

I found it so fascinating that historically this metal element was very commonly found in beauty and cosmetic recipes, alongside other everyday uses, especially as Mercury is a very poisonous metal. I would argue that this proves Elizabethan women went to extreme lengths to achieve beauty, which they did but, so do we to this day with other weird and dangerous beauty/cosmetic remedies such as 'injecting sheep embryo' into your face to look more youthful. My modern day equivalent to this Elizabethan method is Skin whitening/bleaching soap which contains mercury and other harmful ingredients. Annoyingly, I couldn't find particular names of the whitening soaps as a lot of the harmful soaps are found on the black market as they are illegal, but are normally found in countries such as Thailand, Pakistan,Africa and India at cheap prices. Because of this I assume it is because culturally other countries look to western beauty and society as an example of 'Ideal Beauty' which is sad but very common. Using these soaps are highly dangerous and sometimes deadly as they contain high levels of mercury and other harmful chemicals such as Hydroquinone. 



Bibliography.
 Beauty products containing mercury and other chemicals -
 http://www.whiterskin.info/mercury-is-a-dangerous-skin-lightening-ingredient/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25130770.