Why Ancient Egyptians Put Poison in Their Makeup

Put one finger on the skin just under your eye. It is the thinnest skin on your body. For about 4,000 years, people painted metal onto it every day, from childhood. The metal was lead.

The surprise is that it was not an accident. In Egypt, part of that paint was made on purpose, in a workshop, from a recipe. And it seems to have done something useful. Later, the same metal on Roman and European faces did the opposite.

What was really in Egyptian eye paint

Everybody in ancient Egypt wore black paint around the eyes: men, women, children, rich and poor. People were buried with pots of it. The paint is called kohl.

For a long time it looked simple. Grind a soft black rock called galena, which is a lead ore, and mix it with fat.

Then a museum in Paris tested 52 Egyptian makeup pots that still had powder inside. The results did not fit the simple story. There was galena, as expected. There was cerussite, which can form naturally. And there were two lead salts, laurionite and phosgenite, that are not found naturally in Egypt at all.

Nobody dug those up. Somebody made them.

A recipe that took a month

The recipe survives in writing. Take lead oxide, add rock salt, add natron, add water. Stir, change the water, and wait. Repeat for up to a month.

That is not something you find by accident. And the white salts made the paint look worse: less dark, less shiny. So they were not added for beauty. They were added for what they did.

Why it may have protected the eye

Egypt was a hot river valley with standing water and flies. Flies land on eyes, and that is how eye disease spreads. Egyptian medical texts are full of eye complaints.

Researchers put those lead salts onto human skin cells, at the tiny amounts found in real kohl. The cells began to produce nitric oxide, a signal that calls the immune system in. The eye gets more defence before anything has infected it.

This is a finding, not a recommendation. Lead is still lead.

Lead builds up in the body. Kohl sold today still causes lead poisoning in children, and several countries have banned it. The Egyptians were trading one danger for another: going blind now against being poisoned slowly.

Rome wanted a white face

Rome wanted skin with no colour in it. Pale meant you never worked outdoors, so pale meant money.

Chalk is harmless, but it rubs off. So people stood lead over vinegar in a sealed pot for weeks, scraped off the white crust and ground it to powder. White lead was smooth, opaque and lasted all day. It was used for well over a thousand years, into the 1700s.

The trap

Lead on the face does not sting. It goes in slowly, for years. The first thing it ruins is the skin: grey patches, scarring, pitting.

So what do you do when your face looks worse? You put on more. The cure for the damage was the cause of the damage.

Then it moves deeper. Hair falls out from the front. Teeth loosen and blacken. Hands shake. At the end it reaches the brain. The old name for all of it is saturnism.

The best-known case is from London in 1760. A woman called Maria was so admired that crowds followed her in parks. She used white lead heavily for years and could not stop. She died at 27, in a darkened room, refusing to be seen.

Not all old makeup was poison

• Ochre for lips and cheeks is iron-rich earth, and harmless.
• Henna is ground leaves and water, and is still used the same way.
• Almond oil and animal fat protected skin from cracking in a dry climate.
• Tooth blackening in Japan used iron and tea, and it helped seal teeth against decay.

The short answer

Same element, two results. Around the eye, in tiny amounts, it may have helped in a valley where flies blinded people. On the whole face, every day, it took skin, hair, teeth and mind. The difference was only ever how much got in.