Reflections | Musings on history: the ugly past of Chinese cosmetics
It didn't pay to look to closely at the ingredients list in cosmetics of old, writes Wee Kek Koon
Earlier this month, Hong Kong was gripped by a controversy involving Lancôme, after the French beauty brand scrapped a concert by prodemocracy Canto-pop star Denise Ho Wan-sze. Social media got into a tizzy as outraged Hongkongers flushed their Lancôme products down the toilet and rallied for a boycott of every brand owned by its parent company, L’Oréal.
In contrast to today’s conglomerates, the cosmetics business in pre-industrial China was very much a cottage industry, with “artisanal” products “hand-crafted” from ingredients “harvested from nature”, buzzwords that would set modern tills ringing.
However, a closer look at the constituents of traditional powders, lotions and unguents reveals some less swoon-worthy ingredients, such as animal fat, bovine bone marrow, pig’s pancreas and lead, a harmful metal that gave the illusion of a fair complexion.