Oshiroi

Oshiroi is Japanese white makeup. Specialist makers sell it as a paste, neri-oshiroi, as a liquid, mizu-oshiroi, and as a finishing powder. It is worked with water and painted on with a broad, flat brush over a base of oil, then blotted and set until the face and neck are an even, opaque white.^[1][2] It is not a foundation in the Western sense. A foundation is meant to disappear into the skin; oshiroi makes a surface, and the surface is meant to be seen.

For most of its history it was ordinary makeup, the white in the palette of white, red and black that Edo women worked with.^[3] Today it survives chiefly on the stage and in the geisha districts. In kabuki a white face marks a good or high-ranking character,^[4] and makers still sell the white for the stage, for kabuki and for the makeup of maiko, the apprentice geisha of Kyoto.^[1]

The forms suit different jobs. A paste with a little oil in it, like Mitsuyoshi’s neri-oshiroi, can go straight onto the skin, or over the base oil for a stronger white.^[5] The same house’s oil-free kabuki white is made to go over the oil, where it gives strong coverage, for a full stage face or Japanese dance.^[6] A liquid white separates into two layers and is shaken before use; its maker says it covers yet stays translucent, and suggests it as a base as well.^[7] Powder oshiroi, pressed over the top, sets the finish.^[5]

The method has changed little. First comes a base oil. Mitsuyoshi, a Tokyo maker of stage makeup, tells users of its kabuki oil to warm it between the palms and spread it over the nape and the whole face, about two or three soya beans’ worth for the face and four or five for the nape, pressing it into the sides of the nose and around the eyes with the fingertips so that the white will go on without patches.^[8]

Then the white. The maker’s instructions are to wet a flat brush until it no longer drips, work it back and forth over the paste until the bristles are loaded, add water, shape the tip and paint quickly; to press a sponge straight down on the white before the water evaporates, which lifts the moisture and fixes the colour; and to finish with powder.^[9] The Edo handbook Miyako fūzoku kewaiden of 1813 gave its readers a similar order, the forehead first, then the cheeks, the nose and around the mouth, with a damp cloth to lift the white from above the eyes so that it would not look heavy.^[10] In that period the white covered the face, the neck, the back of the neck and the chest.^[11]

The makers are few, and they sell at home. Mitsuyoshi, whose range includes neri-oshiroi, a powder oshiroi and the oil beneath them, takes orders and ships only within Japan,^[12] and the cosmetics maker AIDA sells its liquid oshiroi under the Butaiya name through its own shop in Japan.^[13] What reaches American readers comes through exporters and marketplace sellers, often as kits assembled from several makers.

If you buy that way, ask who made the white, and look for an ingredient list. The white pigments permitted in American cosmetics include titanium dioxide and zinc oxide, and no lead compound is among them.^[14] A pot of unknown age or origin is not worth the risk. For a costume rather than a stage, a very pale cream foundation pressed on with a damp sponge and set with translucent powder gives an even white without the brushwork, and comes off with an ordinary cleanser.

The white came to Japan as a Chinese material: a history of Japanese pharmacy dates the arrival of lead white to about the middle of the fifth century, on the strength of a single source.^[15] By the Edo period, when it was said that a white skin hides seven flaws, two grades were sold: lead white, the cheaper, which the skin took up more readily, and keifun, a dearer white based on mercury.^[16] The cost is written in bone. In an Edo-period samurai cemetery, children of three and under carried a median of 1,241 micrograms of lead per gram of bone, against 23.6 in adult women, and the researchers attribute it to lead white face powder.^[17]

Ending it took half a century. In 1887 the kabuki actor Nakamura Fukusuke, a player of women’s roles, collapsed on stage and was found to have chronic lead poisoning from white powder.^[18] An ordinance of 1900 barred lead from cosmetic colours but held white powder back from the ban because no substitute existed;^[19] Misono, the first lead-free white made in Japan, went on sale in 1904;^[18] and an ordinance of 1930 allowed lead white to be made until the end of 1933 and sold until the end of 1934.^[20] By then everyday faces were turning to Western creams and a healthier look.^[18] The white stayed where a white face is a costume worn for work, on the stage and in the geisha districts, and the paste, the flat brush and the oil beneath are still made to paint it.^[21]