Brought to the colonies by English immigrants, the cosmetic formulas of Culpeper and others blended with American Indian, French, Spanish, as well as African traditions in ways now difficult to disentangle. Native Americans used indigenous plants and their own systems of therapeutics to treat skin problems. Some of these cures became popularized as “Indian medicine.” John Gunn, a doctor practicing on the Tennessee frontier and author of a book on domestic medicine, recommended puccoon root steeped in vinegar for skin disorders; known as “Indian paint,” puccoon root was used in Algonquin remedies. Slaves followed simple cosmetic and grooming techniques that originated in West Africa but also borrowed from American Indian and European practices. They applied substances from the kitchen or garden, smoothing down hair with grease or reddening cheeks with crushed berries. Some continued to plait their hair, make cornrows, or use headwraps in the West African manner, while others tied their hair with string or used other methods to straighten it and then arrange it in Anglo-American styles.6
Similar practices sometimes surfaced in different folk cultures and distinct regions. For example, the custom of using the “warm urine of a little boy” as a cosmetic, recounted by several generations of Mexican Americans, also appears in early Anglo-American manuals as a cure for skin disorders and freckles. John Gunn, for instance, advised that a blue dye containing indigo and urine, “made by country people to color their cloth,” would heal the skin.7
Like household hints and cooking recipes, cosmetic knowledge spread by word of mouth, within families and between neighbors. Women often compiled their own recipe books and passed them on to their daughters. Scattered among food recipes and medical formulas were instructions for compounding cosmetics. The cookbooks of two New England women, a Mrs. Lowell and Mrs. Charles Smith, for instance, contained recipes for making tooth powder, cold cream, and salve for soreness after breast-feeding, all preparations with a therapeutic or sanitary purpose. Occasionally a beauty recipe appeared: Mrs. Smith wrote down instructions for an almond paste to perfume the body, while Mrs. Lowell included a tinted lip salve, from a recipe dating back to 1694, that required “sallad oyl,” redwood, and balsam. Eleanor Custis Lewis, the granddaughter of George Washington, often made pots of lip salve from wax, hogs’ lard, spermaceti, almond oil, balsam, alkanet root, raisins, and sugar. “This was Grandmama's lip salve & I never knew any so good,” she wrote.8
Recipes for cosmetics began to be published in the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By this time, methods of physical care formerly treated as a single body of knowledge had split into such distinct “disciplines” as medicine, cooking, and grooming. Physicians and pharmacists increasingly claimed the medical and pharmaceutical dimensions of health care as their own. But throughout the nineteenth century, natural healing recipes and hygienic practices remained women's domain. Indeed, women's authority in these areas may have been strengthened early in the century, as a popular health movement emphasizing self-help, prevention, and natural remedies gained ground.9
Women's access to information about cosmetics expanded even more with the publishing boom of the 1840s and 1850s. Ladies’ guides to beauty and fashion self-consciously addressed bourgeois women—and all those who aspired to that rank. Like etiquette books, they explained how to navigate the genteel social world by cultivating a well-groomed face and form; cheaper paperback editions carried the same message to female millworkers and domestic servants. At the same time, household encyclopedias compiled cosmetic recipes in voluminous works that offered, as one put it, “anything you want to know.” These peculiarly American creations promoted family self-sufficiency, good citizenship, and do-it-yourself virtue, even as they plagiarized one another. Sold throughout the United States, often by traveling agents and peddlers, the compendiums could be found in farming, artisan, as well as middle-class households.10
The two genres diverged in tone, reflecting different class and cultural orientations. Encyclopedias were haphazard acculumations of beauty knowledge, cataloguing page after page of recipes with only an occasional warning or moral judgment. Simple garden substances—the juice of elderberries or burned cork to darken lashes, for example—could yield satisfactory results with no one the wiser. The ladies’ guides, in contrast, worried over questions of women's health and morality, but nevertheless recited harmful formulas for beautifying—and even painting—the face. Still, both genres point to the growing importance of maintaining a good appearance in an increasingly commercial and mobile society.
Recipes in such household manuals and beauty guides frequently presumed a notion of the body and health based on the ancient theory of the humors. In this view, four humors or bodily fluids—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile—exist in different proportions to determine a person's health. The humors in turn produce four human temperaments—sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic—that reveal themselves in the appearance and condition of the skin. Humoralism regarded the inner and outer aspects of the body not as separate, bounded entities but as elastic dimensions in flux. A good complexion thus was a matter of temperament, health, and spirit.11
Sir Hugh Plat in his 1651 cookbook, Delights for Ladies, illustrates the basic principle. An attorney with a red, pimpled face, who had spent freely on medicine to no avail, was told to line “double linnen socks of a pretty bigness” with bay salt “well dryed and powdered,” then “every Morning and Evening dry his socks by the fire, and put them on again.” According to Plat, the lawyer's face cleared in fourteen days: The salt had pulled out moisture and cooled the body through the feet, which modulated the flow of bodily fluids and reduced “exceeding high and furious colour” in the face. Although socks full of salt may have been an extreme measure, early English manuals commonly recommended barley water, vinegar, wine, and lemons to cool the blood or draw out ruddiness.12
Many cosmetic recipes also affirmed popular beliefs in the power of nature's cycles, astrology, and magic. They cautioned housewives to concoct simple compounds using only herbs, roots, and flowers. To remove freckles, Plat advised, “Wash your face in the wane of the Moon with a sponge morning and evening with the distilled water of Elder leaves, letting the same dry into the skin.” Others instructed readers on how to gather May dew, considered the purest of waters, or invoked the curative powers of spring by insisting on strawberry-water, frog-spawn water, the juice from birch saplings, or the dew from young vines.13
These beliefs did not survive the new medical techniques and scientific discoveries of the Enlightenment. In the volatile struggle among apothecaries, barber-surgeons, chemists, and medical doctors, humoralism in particular was discredited as a framework for medical treatment. Nevertheless, these various therapeutic traditions persisted as a source of lore about health, hygiene, and beauty, and as a lexicon for reading individual character in the human face. Nineteenth-century American beauty guides and household encyclopedias warned that freckles were difficult to eradicate because it was “dangerous to drive back the humors which produce them.” Recipes called for virgin milk and the first juice of spring plants. Some recipes even followed principles of medieval alchemy, like the “cosmetic juice” made by filling a hollowed-out lemon with sugar, covering it with gold leaf, and roasting it in a fire. A British journalist observed in 1838 that the “superstition” about bathing the face in May dew was “not yet quite extinct”; indeed, folklorists recorded such beliefs among Americans of different ethnic backgrounds as late as the 1950s and 1960s.14
One old tradition, also deriving from the humors, survived the Enlightenment intact: the importance of regular habits of breathing, eating, sleeping, excretion, and emotional control. These habits were known as hygienic regimen or the “non-naturals,” so called because