“Making the face beautiful”(feature on medieval beauty products)

Abstract

In the Middle Ages, people had an ambivalent relationship to the beauty products: some were fully supportive of the attempts to beautify oneself, while the others, first and foremost the representatives of the church, frowned upon this notion. This feature represents a show?case of the advice and recipes for beautification from two medical collections created in the late Middle Ages. These are the Byzantine medical treatise (dating from 11th to 14th century) and the collection of Serbian medieval medicine, the so-called Hodoch Code (dating from the end of the 14th or beginning of the 15th century). The treatise is focusing more on the practical advice than theoretical knowledge, and its greatest part is dedicated to pharmacology. Hodoch Code (Hodoski zbornik) is in fact a therapeutic collection, and it consists of diverse medical texts. These collections contain the advice how to make one?s face white, hair black or blond, but most certainly rich in volume, as well as recipes for treating facial lines, warts, freckles, cracked lips or bad breath.