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The Islamic World

The Islamic World: Kohl, Henna and the Medicine of Adornment

Not a country and not a century: a sphere in which cosmetics were filed as medicine and worked out as chemistry.

The essayKohl, Henna and the Medicine of Adornment

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A woman of eleventh-century Muslim Spain in patterned silk holds her henna-stained palms open, her eye margins darkened, before red-and-white horseshoe arches, a glass distilling flask and a moulded cake of scent below.
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From Baghdad to Córdoba · 9th – 12th centuriesMedicine & Adornment
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The Islamic World: The Chronology

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In short

Around the year 1000 the Andalusian physician al-Zahrawi gave one of the thirty books of his medical encyclopaedia to adwiyat al-zinah, the medicines of adornment — which placed cosmetics inside medicine rather than beside it, and is a large part of why the recipes survive at all.

In the Islamic World

Medicine & Adornment

13 articles across 4 collections

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