Two Famous Deaths: The Stories Beauty History Cannot Prove

European beauty history supplies two deaths by cosmetics, and both are told with a confidence the sources do not carry.

This is not an argument that lead cosmetics were harmless. It is an argument that these two particular cases are weaker than their fame suggests, and that a real hazard does not need bad examples.

The study of how Elizabeth I’s face was represented — in eyewitness reports, poetry, portraiture and beauty discourse — records scholarly doubt about how much contemporary evidence exists that she used ceruse at all.^[1]

That is a more radical position than the usual debate allows for. The familiar argument is about how much ceruse she wore and what it did to her; the scholarship questions the prior step, which is whether the contemporary record establishes that she wore it.^[1]

It follows that the argument about quantity is being conducted above an unsettled foundation. Debating how thickly a queen applied a substance is not useful while the evidence that she applied it at all is in question.^[1]

Largely from portraits, and a portrait is not a photograph. Renaissance portraiture is painted idealisation rather than documentation, and its complexion and hairline conventions are conventions before they are observations.^[2]

A very white face in a painting is therefore ambiguous by construction: it may record a painted face, an unpainted face rendered in the period’s idiom for a noble complexion, or a decision about how a queen should look. The picture does not distinguish them.^[2]

Nor was it meant to. A portrait of a monarch is a political object before it is a likeness, and asking it to report a complexion accurately is asking it to do a job it was never commissioned for.^[2]

The standard biographical reference for Maria Gunning records two things side by side: that she is thought to have destroyed her health through persistent use of white lead as a cosmetic, and that she died of tuberculosis in 1760.^[3]

Both statements are in the entry and this article endorses neither over the other. What can be said is that the scholarly record holds them together, and that popular accounts almost always print the first and drop the second.^[3]

Because it converts an unresolved case into a settled one and a reference entry into a proof. A source that records two accounts is being cited for one, which is a misuse of it however true the surviving half might be.^[4]

Chronic lead exposure and tuberculosis can also both be present, and an eighteenth-century record will rarely separate them. The honest reading is that the cause is not established, not that one side has won.^[4]

It is worth adding what would settle it, since nothing here does. Skeletal lead measurement is the test that works, as the Edo study shows, and in the absence of remains and analysis the case stays exactly where the reference entry leaves it.^[4]

It looks like bone. Median lead in children of Edo-period samurai families measured 1241.0 micrograms per gram of dry bone in those aged three and under and 462.5 in those aged four to six, against 14.3 in adult males and 23.6 in adult females.^[5]

Even that is careful about its own limits: the authors attribute the exposure to lead-based white face powder, and the attribution is made on the balance of evidence rather than as a demonstrated route. This is what a well-evidenced claim about cosmetic lead sounds like, and it is not an anecdote about a famous woman.^[5]

Whether either woman used lead cosmetics, in what quantity, and what part it played in her death. No source cited here settles any of the three, and the study of Elizabeth’s representation is not a medical account and makes no claim about her cause of death.^[6]

Where the two stories acquired their present confidence is also unestablished. Both are old, both are repeated without attribution, and tracing either to its first assertive telling would be worth doing.^[7]

What is certain is that neither story is needed. The Edo bone measurements establish that lead cosmetics did serious harm, on evidence that does not depend on any individual’s biography.^[6]