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Dress and Personal Adornment

Pliny ( Natural History)Ovid (Art of Love)Martial (Epigrams)Juvenal (Satires)

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WoolSilkCottonNettlesHempFlax

Fabrics

Toga tunic

Barber

Those scars you see on my chin, like the mark on some old boxer’s face, were not made by my angry wife in one of her tempers, but by the cursed hand and blade of Antiochus (the barber). The he-goat is the only beast with any sense– he wears a beard to escape Antiochus. (Martial)

Depilation

Alipilus

Women’s clothing ( tunic, stola)

Palla

Hairstyles

Flavian style

Styling

Lest your hair drenched in ointments should stain your fine silk dresses, pass a large pin through the braided locks and sustain them. (Martial)

I can’t bear those women who scratch their hairdresser’s face, seize the hairpin from their hand and jab it into the arm (Ovid)

Dyes

Henna=red Sapo (animal fat and beechwood ash)

=blond

Natural hair wigs

Ovid on hair dye

Didn’t I tell you to stop messing around with the color of your hair?

Now you have no hair left to dye!

Now your hair has fallen out, and you alone are responsible. You yourself mixed the poison and put it on your head. Now Germany will send you her captured locks of hair, and a conquered race will save you from the embarrassment of baldness

If you had left it alone, who had thicker hair than you? And when you let it down, it used to hang to your waist. It was very fine—so fine that you hesitated to curl it with curling irons—like the silk fibers the Chinese produce, or the threads which the spider spins with slender legs when she weaves a delicate web under a deserted beam. But it was neither raven black nor golden blond; it was a mixture of the two, the color of cedar wood when the bark has been stripped away. And it was easy to manage, naturally curly, and didn’t cause you any trouble. You didn’t have to worry about pins or combs being caught in tangles and hurting when they were pulled out. Your hairdresser was never bruised or scratched.

Pliny the Elder (Natural History) Fixing skin imperfections

Milk of an ass

Butter and lead

Calf genitals cooked with honey and vinegar

Bull bile and water

Ovid on “Smoother more radiant skin”

First strip away the husks and the chaff from some barley, preferably the variety sent from Libya by boat. Clean two pounds of this barley. Moisten an equal amount of vetch with ten eggs. When the barley has dried in blowing breezes, crush it with a rough millstone turned by a lazy donkey. Grind up along with the barley the horns of a lively young stag. Add twelve narcissus bulbs stripped of their outer layers and pulverized on pure marble. Then add nine times as much honey. If you pamper your face with such a mixture your skin will be smoother and more radiant than your own mirror. ( Ovid)

And if the face lacks the natural rosy hue that comes from the blood, there are arts to achieve it. Apply your art to reinforce the thin rim of the eyebrows, and let a small mole adorn the milky-white cheeks . Nor is there any shame in highlighting the eyes with charcoal or with crocus

Fucus Antimony

Let not your lover catch you with your jars of cream on the table: a dissimulated art serves beauty all the better ( Ovid)

But that face, transformed and softened with endless poultices, plastered with endless cakes of flour, cooked and soaked would you call it a face or a sore? (Juvenal)

Jewelry

Do not let your armpits reek like a Goat … do not let your teeth turn black through laziness… but wash out your mouth each morning.( Ovid)

Oral hygiene

When you pass by it’s as if Cosmo the perfumer were moving shop and cinnamon streamed from an upturned bottle. I don’t want you , Gellia, to take to such futile things. You know, I think even my dog could smell as well perfumed. (Martial)