This Victorian beauty mask is guaranteed to give you nightmares
Strap it to your face overnight, they said. It’ll be fine, they said.
If you’re of a certain age and—ahem—experience, you’ve woken up next to some stuff. But Hannibal Lecter is not one of them.
Which is where Madam Rowley’s Face Mask comes in. Patented in 1875, this beauty device was strapped to a woman’s head overnight…three nights per week. Made of flexible india rubber, the mask could be filled with “unguents” and all manner of salves and bleaches to treat the skin. However, the mask had another purpose: to make the face sweat all night long.
Also called the “face glove,” the device would excite “perspiration with a view to soften and clarify the skin by relieving the pores and the superficial circulation.”
Inventor Helen Rowley claimed the mask could be used by persons “suffering with certain forms of disease, or afflicted with a bad complexion,” which came in the form of “cutaneous eruptions, blotches, pimples…freckles or fugitive discolorations and for clogged pores and capillary congestion.”
The popularity of Madam Rowley’s mask led to market competition. One “improved” overnight mask was made of flannel. Another complained that existing masks didn’t allow “poisonous gases” to escape, so she proposed layers of chamois and satin.
If all else failed, Victorian women layered raw beef or veal over their faces before bed.
Dangerous cosmetic inventions were commonly peddled to the Victorian upper classes. Arsenic soap claimed to cure pimples and “bad blood.” Makeup foundation made with lead was particularly popular for covering smallpox scars—and poisoning the body.
At the time, acne, rosacea, or common flakiness were also considered outward indicators of poor lifestyle choices or psychological problems. Published in 1841, the Handbook of the Toilette warned, “Goodness of complexion, whether the skin be fair or brown, is incompatible with excess of bodily or mental labour, or excess of pleasure and dissipation.”
Instead, women were urged to follow their beauty routines with rest and a quiet mind. The British paper The Girl’s Own Mind advised, “They must abstain from all gusts of passion, particularly envy, as that gives the skin a sallow paleness.”
At least women had the face glove to fall back on, even though it probably produced little more than dehydration and nightmares.
