For centuries, women have gone to unnatural and even deadly lengths for beauty. Commoners and queens have covered their faces in lead, ingested arsenic and stuffed their feet, waists and breasts into various binds, all in the name of an ever-shifting ideal. Yet, the history of beauty is also one of agency. Women have leveraged the burden of beauty standards to build community and businesses—and to assert power through their own appearance.

The Roman poet Ovid advised women that, "your artifice should go unsuspected. Who could help but feel disgust at the thick paint on your face?" In other words, work hard to be beautiful, just hide what it takes to get there.

Women in ancient Greece hid their grays with henna dye. Ancient Egyptians valued their cosmetics so much, they packed them up for the afterlife: Excavated tombs have yielded lipstick, blush, moisturizers and eyeliner, items sold in drugstores today.

Cosmetics are often dismissed as frivolous. But if that’s the case, why have they existed since antiquity? Jill Burke, author of How to Be A Renaissance Woman: The Untold Story of Beauty & Female Creativity, believes it’s because, for many women, beauty was about more than looking good; it was about survival: "For much of recorded history, women could not own property and were reliant on husbands,” she says. Beauty was a path to attaining security—especially in a world where appearance was conflated with worth.

Physiognomy, the belief that character could be read in one’s physical appearance, was popular in Renaissance Europe. Curly hair meant you were “argumentative and infertile," while, "if you were too blonde or too plump, you weren’t smart,” Burke says. It’s no surprise, then, that beauty advice was big business. The Ornaments of Ladies by Giovanni Marinello, published in Venice in 1562, contained over 1,400 cosmetic recipes arranged by the body part in need of correcting.

Given beauty’s importance, a woman caught altering her looks aroused serious suspicion. In the mid-19th century, a London newspaper joked about an alleged colonial-era act that would have allowed men to divorce wives who misled them about their appearance:

"All women...that shall from and after this act impose upon, seduce, or betray into matrimony any of His Majesty’s subjects by the use of scents, paints, cosmetics, washes, artificial teeth, false hair...high heeled shoes, or bolstered hips, shall incur the penalty of the law now in force against witchcraft...the marriage, upon conviction, shall stand null and void."

Given beauty's power to bewitch, such a law would likely be unenforceable.

Policing what counts as beautiful is another way to wield power. For thousands of years, cultural norms in certain parts of the world have favored fair complexions. With social and financial prospects at stake, many across ancient China, Japan, Egypt, Greece and Rome have turned to skin whitening techniques. In Asia, as in Rome, lighter skin suggested wealth or at the very least, that one didn’t have to work outdoors.

 In the 1st century, Pliny the Elder wrote that women used lead "to whiten the complexion,” despite knowing that "taken internally, it is a poison." The use of lead to whiten skin reached its apex in Venetian ceruse, a 16th-century cosmetic so deadly it holds the Guinness World Record for most toxic makeup. Made from powdered lead carbonate and vinegar, it caused everything from tooth loss to mental decline.

It was often used to conceal scarring from diseases like smallpox and syphilis, even though it was known to cause further damage: “In addition to destroying the beauty of the face with long use," wrote pioneering female chemist Mademoiselle Meurdrac in 1666, "they produce very troublesome and occasionally incurable illnesses, and it is of this that ladies must beware.”

Lead wasn’t the only toxic path to lighter skin. Nostradamus' so-called "Treatise on Makeup and Jams,” published in 1552, contained a recipe for mercury-based skin-whitening cream, while in Victorian England, women were willing to ingest arsenic wafers to "remove all imperfections" and achieve that deathly pallor.

In the age of colonial European expansion, the white beauty ideal was used to "justify the brutal and dehumanizing treatment of darker-skinned women," says Burke. (This colonial legacy is alive and well; consumers spent $8.8 billion dollars on skin whitening globally in 2020.)

Hairstyles have long been used to signify health, wealth and marriage status. In many cultures, women’s hair is so sexualized that it’s kept hidden. In first century Rome, husbands could divorce wives who uncovered their heads in public. Orthodox Jewish women don wigs after marriage, and most medieval Europeans wore their hair up or under a veil after tying the knot.

Given hair’s power, refusing to adhere to beauty norms can be a potent form of protest. During the civil rights movement, the afro was a symbol of Black pride. In the 1960s and '70s, long hair telegraphed a rejection of the military buzz cut and, by extension, conscription in the Vietnam War.

With so much meaning wrapped up in hair, it makes sense that its absence also sends a message. The Huli Wigmen of Papua, New Guinea, spend years making elaborate wigs to convey their social status, adorning them with everything from fur to beetles.

Wigs reached new heights in 18th-century Europe, when baldness was associated with syphilis. Doctors at the time treated the sexually transmitted disease with mercury, which caused hair loss. Big hair—real or fabricated—became a sign of health and manliness. Male members of the aristocracy wore wigs so tall they inspired the insult, "bigwig."

Not all hairstyles sit atop the head. Renaissance artists from Titian to Botticelli depicted Venus as the epitome of natural female beauty. Below her long, flowing locks was a glaring absence: Her lack of pubic hair.

"It was the confluence of a renewed interest in classical sculpture and the arrival of immigrants with different beauty traditions,” says Burke. "Body hair removal had been part of Islamic bathing culture for centuries." After Spain expelled the Jews in 1492 and the Muslims after that, these immigrant women brought their recipes for depilatory creams with them to other parts of Europe.

One recipe from 1532 called for a "pint of arsenic and [an] eighth of a pint of quicklime,” to be applied in the bath and quickly removed "so the flesh doesn’t come off."

This wasn’t the only dangerous hair removal method in history: In the 1890s, doctors began using X-rays to tame body hair. X-ray hair removal was so widespread that by the late 1960s, it had been linked with 35 percent of women’s radiation-based skin cancers.

Disposable razor blades weren’t marketed to women until almost 1920, when the fashion for rising hemlines and bared arms made underarm and leg hair taboo.

Before the Brazilian butt lift, there were bum rolls—a roll of padding tied around the hips to hold a woman’s skirt out from the body in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. And over 2,000 years before Ozempic, Minoans were squeezing into what may have been the world’s first corsets.

"Women never really gave up the corset. They internalized it through diet and exercise, tummy tucks and liposuction," says Valerie Steele, Director of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. "Once clothing began to show more skin, you had to actually change your body." 

While "the father of plastic surgery," Sushruta, was already hard at work as early as 600 B.C. in India, it would take the large-scale facial disfigurement of World War I soldiers for cosmetic procedures to evolve from high-risk to high-reward.

Suzanne Noël, the world’s first female aesthetic surgeon, trained on World War I battlefields before offering facelifts to women. "Noël worked with women who came to her in despair having been thrown out of their jobs for looking too old or left by their husbands," says Virginia Nicholson, author of All the Rage: Stories from the Frontline of Beauty. "For her, facelifts were feminism. While she could not change the status quo, she could restore a woman’s place to redress the power imbalance."

In Noël’s time, plastic surgery was a closely guarded secret of the elite. In the age of social media, plastic surgery is normalized and, increasingly, public. And it’s on the rise: 15.8 million surgical aesthetic procedures were performed worldwide in 2023.

Elise Hu, the author of Flawless, spent years as NPR’s Bureau Chief in South Korea, the country with the highest per capita rate of plastic surgery in the world. She attributes this surge to what she calls "the technological gaze." She explains: "Because social media algorithms are constantly tweaking, because artificial intelligence is constantly learning and changing, the gaze shifts our beauty standards as well, because it teaches us what we’re supposed to look like."

A 2024 study from Boston University found that the more time you spend scrolling on social media, the more likely you are to consider cosmetic procedures. Researchers also found a correlation between using photo editing applications like Facetune and Lightroom and considering plastic surgery—a striking finding, considering that 80 percent of girls in America have used appearance-altering filters by age 13.

Still, beauty salons have played an important role in forming community and identity, whether it’s among immigrants in Renaissance Italy or South Asian threading salons dedicated to preserving ancestral traditions.

Beauty parlors "are a space women spend time together, outside of the eyes of men, a center of community and creativity," Burke says.

The pursuit of beauty requires time and money and upkeep. But for many women (and increasingly, men), the salons and spas and spaces where they go to look good often make them feel good too. There's beauty in that.