Deleting Your Data

You can delete your account yourself, at any time, and it takes effect at once. Nobody has to approve it, and there is no waiting period.

Deleting your account

1. Sign in and open Settings, Privacy & data.
2. If you want a copy first, choose Download my data: one file with everything we hold about you, your encrypted answers included.
3. Under Delete your account, type "delete", and confirm. If you have not signed in for a little while, you will be asked to confirm that it is you first.

Your account is deleted immediately, and with it everything it holds: your profile and every answer in it (the encrypted health, height and weight answers too), your photo, your saves, lists and Cabinet, your listening history, Vivien's picks, your consents and your sessions. We send one last email to confirm it.

What is kept for a short time afterwards

• The security log's entries, no longer linked to anyone, for up to 90 days, so that misuse can still be investigated.
• A line in the email log saying the confirmation was sent, with the address masked, for 180 days.
• Database backups, which expire after at most 35 days and are used only to recover the site after a failure.

Deleting only part of it

• An answer: change or clear it in your beauty profile.
• Health answers, height and weight, or listening history: withdraw that permission in Settings, under Privacy & data. What it covered is deleted at once.
• Your photo: remove it in Settings.
• Vivien's picks: choose "Stop suggestions" in Settings, and nothing more is worked out about you until you switch them back on.

If you signed in with Google

Deleting your History of Makeup account does not touch your Google account. To remove our access as well, open your Google Account, go to Security, then "Your connections to third-party apps and services", and remove History of Makeup.

If you cannot sign in, or have no account

If you have lost access to your account, try resetting your password first. If that does not work, or you want us to delete something else — a letter you sent us — write to privacy@historyofmakeup.com from the address concerned. We may send a code to that address to make sure the request is yours, and we act on it within one month.

What your browser keeps

Hearts saved before signing in, and your recent searches, are kept in your own browser, not by us. Clearing this site's data in your browser settings removes them.

If you accepted Google Analytics, choose Cookie settings in the footer of the site's pages, then Reject: the measuring stops and its cookies are deleted from this site at once. What was sent before is deleted from Google Analytics after 14 months; the privacy notice explains how to have it deleted sooner.

The privacy notice sets out everything we keep and for how long.