Opacifier

A synthetic white that grows as flat, highly reflective crystals, giving the silvery pearl finish which dominated cosmetics for decades before coated mica arrived.

Galena is the natural ore of lead sulphide, ground on a stone palette and bound with fat to make the black eye paint of dynastic Egypt. It is the material behind the oldest sense of the word kohl.

Three iron compounds, a red, a yellow and a black, which between them mix almost every shade of human skin and carry most of the colour in foundation, concealer and pressed powder.

A white aluminium-silicate clay named after the hill near Jingdezhen where it was dug for porcelain; in cosmetics it mattifies by absorbing oil rather than by covering it.

A platy potassium aluminium silicate that splits into flakes thin enough to be transparent, supplying the shimmer in most eyeshadows and the substrate for nearly every pearlescent pigment.

Red ochre is iron-oxide-rich earth, haematite mixed with clay and quartz: the oldest colouring material in the human record, and, purified and synthesised, still the red in most foundations.

The softest mineral known, a hydrated magnesium silicate whose stacked platelets slide over one another under a fingertip; the material that gives a face powder its slip.

The manufactured white that replaced lead: a titanium oxide with a refractive index high enough to make it the most opaque white a cosmetic chemist can use, and a permitted mineral ultraviolet filter.

A synthetic basic lead carbonate, made since antiquity by corroding metallic lead over vinegar, which gave the face a dense opaque white and is the most consequential poisonous cosmetic in the European record.

The white that came between lead and titanium: a manufactured zinc oxide, mildly astringent and mildly soothing, now met as often in a mineral sunscreen as in a face powder.