The Japanese Tradition

Japanese Makeup: White Powder, Safflower Red and Blackened Teeth

Three colours, held to for a thousand years, and a white face that was ordinary long before it belonged to the geisha.

The essayWhite Powder, Safflower Red and Blackened Teeth

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Japan · 4th century CE – presentWhite, Red, Black

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The Japanese Tradition: The Chronology

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400
Blackened Teeth: The Cosmetic That Left a Skeleton
Almost every cosmetic vanishes with the body that wore it. This one stained the part that survives.
450
Lead Arrives From China: A Material and Its Fourteen-Hundred-Year Exit
It took a few decades for lead white to establish itself in Japan and fourteen centuries to get rid of it, and the law that is supposed to have banned it did not.
900
Three Colours and No More: A Palette Defined by Refusal
Most traditions accumulate colours. This one worked for centuries with three and got more out of them than the accumulators did.
1700
Beni, by the Fraction of a Per Cent: Why a Red Was Worth Its Weight
The flower is generous with a yellow nobody wanted and miserly with the red everybody did.
1850
The Pale Face: Pallor, Status and Two Thousand Years of Lead
A pale face was a claim about work, and for two thousand years the claim was most often made with lead.

In short

Japanese makeup worked in three colours — the white of oshiroi powder, the red of safflower beni, and the black of blackened teeth and painted brows — and the heavy white face now read as a geisha's was, for most of its history, ordinary makeup worn by ordinary women.