Welcome to our historical beauty project!

Hi, everyone! Our names are Mary and Taylor and we're working on a "cosmetics and perfumery through the ages" project in which we'll be uncovering and sharing cosmetics/perfume recipes as well as beauty rituals from the ancients to the Victorians. Think of it as the perfect way for modern beauty "geeks" to experiment with recipes from the Greeks! A pyxis was a cosmetics container in ancient Greece, so it seemed appropriate to include it in the name of our blog.

Mary will be including photos of ancient, Medieval, and early Modern cosmetic and perfume vessels as well as paintings/sculpture depicting beauty rituals. She will talk about beauty preparations through the ages, sometimes making comparisons between cultures and time periods.

Taylor will be focusing on authentic cosmetic and perfume recipes, sometimes tweaked a bit to reflect modern availability and excluding ingredients that we now know are unsafe (but we will talk about it all).

We hope that you enjoy our project!




A red-figure pyxis, Greek, 5th century BCE