Compacts, tubes, mirrors and palettes — beauty as something you could hold, carry, and be seen carrying.
14 objects, filed by subject, era and culture
Every object is filed in one or more drawers. Open any to narrow the collection, and the case shows only what it holds.
Where to beginFrom the kohl pot to the refillable lipstick
All 14 objects
Before the wand, mascara was a dry cake of pigment in soap that had to be wetted and worked with a small brush. The form dominated until automatic mascaras arrived in 1957, and its best-known brand began with a legend that its historian does not believe.
Egyptian spoons carved as a swimming woman holding a dish out ahead of her are catalogued as cosmetic spoons. The name records a reasonable inference from the shallow bowl; the objects themselves do not say what they held.
Fitted dressing cases were in use from at least the eighteenth century and were most popular in the nineteenth. A man's case made in Leeds, thought to be for the Great Exhibition of 1851, holds seventeen pieces; a lady's dressing bag of 1892 is catalogued in fifty-nine parts.
The mechanical eyelash curler went on sale in 1923 as the Kurlash, invented by Charles W. Stickel of Rochester, New York, and redesigned within a year into the form still sold today. Within two years its price had fallen from five dollars to one.
Eyeshadow was sold one shade at a time well into the twentieth century. The multi-pan palette is a later format, and what it sells is a proposed relationship between colours rather than a colour.
The oldest known mirrors are polished obsidian discs from Neolithic Anatolia. What changed between those and the mirror in a compact was not the idea but the clarity, the size and the price.
Alabaster, serpentinite, faience, wood and reed. Egyptian kohl containers survive in quantity, and the form of a narrow tube built around a slender rod is the strongest surviving evidence for how the powder inside was applied.
Lip colour in stick form is older than the metal case, and the metal case is older than the American story told about it. The swivel mechanism patented in 1923 made advancing and retracting the stick a one-handed action; cases that could also be opened and shut with one hand came a decade later.
From the mid-seventeenth century fashionable Europeans wore small black patches on the face, and kept them in tiny boxes fitted with a mirror. Samuel Pepys noted his wife's first patches in 1660; Joseph Addison joked in 1711 that London's women patched by political party.
A shallow metal case with a hinged mirror, a puff and a sprung catch. The patent record shows the compact was designed against mess, and ended up licensing a gesture performed in public.
Hermès launched its first lipsticks in March 2020 in metal cases described as fully refillable, and in 2025 Louis Vuitton launched a line designed to be refilled and kept. Refillable luxury cases were sold in the 1950s too; the difference now is the argument made for them.
A tiny rock crystal container shaped like a fish, carved in the late ninth or early tenth century, is thought to have held kohl, drawn out on a rod through the hole drilled into its body. It belongs to a small group of similar fish in London, Vienna and Paris, and to a world in which kohl had the standing of prophetic custom.
The rosewater sprinkler, or gulab pash, is a round flask with a long narrow neck for scattering scented water. Surviving examples in gilt silver, enamel and porcelain trace a courtly custom across India and the markets that made goods for it, and some of them trace plunder as well.
A tebako is a Japanese lacquered box for cosmetics and toilet articles. The finest examples, from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, are among the masterpieces of Japanese lacquer, decorated with ox-cart wheels half-sunk in a stream in gold and mother-of-pearl. Their contents did not survive.