Editorial Standards

Sourcing

Articles are written from published scholarship, primary sources, museum and archive catalogues, trade literature and patent records. Where a secondary source is used, it is one that cites its own evidence.

Every section containing a date carries at least one citation. This is enforced by the build rather than left to discipline: the content validator scans each section for a four-digit year and refuses to publish one that has no source attached. The site cannot deploy with that rule broken.

Citations appear as numbered markers in the text and resolve to a full reference list at the foot of each article, with author, title, year, publisher and — where the source is online — the URL and the date it was consulted.

Claims we are deliberately careful with

Several widely-repeated stories about beauty history do not survive contact with their sources. Arsenic complexion wafers, the specific composition of Cleopatra's cosmetics, and the supposed universal toxicity of every historical pigment are the most common. Where this site touches one of them, it states what the evidence actually supports and what it does not, even when the cautious version is the less entertaining one.

Anything presented as a regulatory fact — that an ingredient is restricted, banned or permitted at a given concentration — is attributed to a named instrument with a date. Regulation changes, and an unattributed safety claim is worse than none.

Imagery

Photographs and illustrations on this site fall into three categories, and each is labelled:

• Archival material — where we reproduce an object from a museum or archive collection, it is credited to the holding institution. At present every image on the site is an illustration.
• Commissioned illustration — original artwork made for this site, including AI-generated illustration. These are credited as commissioned and are never presented as historical photographs.
• Product pictures — our own illustrations of the kind of product (a pot of cream blush, say), never a photograph of the item on sale, and labelled as illustrations.

The distinction matters. A generated image of "a 1920s woman" is an illustration of an idea, not a document of a person, and treating it as evidence would undermine everything else on the page. Generated imagery is never used to depict a real identifiable person, a specific historical event, or a real product.

Where software assists

Language models are used in this project for drafting support, for generating illustration, and for producing supplementary material such as summaries and timelines. They are not used as a source.

Generated supplementary material is held in a review queue and is only published after a human approves it. Before it even reaches that queue it passes an automatic check: every date and proper noun in the generated text must already appear in the source prose it was derived from. Anything that introduces a new name or year is rejected outright, because that is the failure mode that matters on this subject — plausible, fluent, invented detail.

Audio narration, where available, is synthesised from the published article text. It is labelled as such. The site's background music, which plays only when a reader turns it on, is AI-composed and is credited as such where it is played.

Corrections

Errors are corrected in the article itself and the change is noted rather than made silently. Substantive corrections — a changed fact, date or attribution — are marked on the page. Typographic fixes are not.

To report one, write to corrections@historyofmakeup.com with the page and, where possible, the source.

Commercial independence

No article is commissioned, shaped or altered by a commercial partner. No brand reviews copy before publication. Products appear because they belong to the subject, and a product's inclusion is never conditional on a commercial arrangement existing. The arrangements that do exist are set out in the affiliate disclosure.