Art historian Erin Griffey is a little bit of a magnificence maven. “I’m one of those people who reads the backs of beauty products,” she says. That’s why, whereas engaged on a ebook about magnificence tradition in Renaissance Europe, Griffey skilled déjà vu.
She observed that many components in magnificence recipes from the sixteenth to 18th centuries — compiled from books, beauty recipe collections, medical texts, well being routine manuscripts, herbals and pharmacopeias — additionally seem on trendy magnificence packaging. For occasion, rosewater is utilized in trendy skin-hydrating mists and sulfur is present in some over-the-counter pimples lotions.
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Such similarities are clues to what Renaissance-era individuals used the merchandise for and the way the merchandise labored. But they aren’t the entire story. That’s as a result of the traditional recipes typically additionally checklist weird and even harmful components, from bile acids and calves’ hooves to steer and the toxic bryony plant. To get a greater understanding, Griffey needed to re-create the recipes. So she turned to her colleagues on the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Thus the Beautiful Chemistry Project was born.
The staff began with what Griffey calls “sticky recipes” as a result of they’re discovered in lots of sources all through the Renaissance interval: rosemary flowers in white wine, myrrh powder with egg white, and the velvety protecting of newly grown deer antlers with bean flour.
The recipes are usually obscure and diversified. So chemist Michel Nieuwoudt and her staff experiment with the measurements and procedures whereas Griffey searches numerous sources for extra clues to ingredient varieties and ratios.
“We knew we could not re-create it exactly as is,” Griffey says of the recipe for rosemary flowers in white wine. “We do not have access to the rosemary plants that grew 500 years ago or the wines and whatever their chemical makeup was.” But this legwork “enabled us to get closer to an approximation.”
Nieuwoudt and her staff boiled rosemary flowers in round-bottom flasks every stuffed with a unique resolution: candy white wine, dry white wine, ethanol in water or aqua vitae. Once the researchers filtered out the flowers and analyzed the ensuing mixtures utilizing fuel chromatography and mass spectrometry, they discovered chemical compounds which might be widespread in right this moment’s skincare merchandise, together with soothing camphor, eucalyptol and the aromatic alcohol linalool (SN: 7/22/02).
The Renaissance-era recipe acknowledged the potion would “make the face fair.” Nieuwoudt’s findings recommend how: by firming and moisturizing pores and skin.
A Renaissance-era recipe for a potion to “make the skin fair” requires boiling rosemary flowers in candy white wine (left). Chemists re-created the recipe and located that the ensuing liquid (proper) — proven within the Renaissance-style bottle on the left — comprises camphor, eucalyptol and linalool, which suggests the product acts as a hydrating pores and skin toner. The bottle on the proper comprises the extract from a myrrh concoction.E. Griffey, M. Nieuwoudt
The staff has additionally made progress on unlocking the secrets and techniques of myrrh powder and egg whites. Experiments recommend that myrrh attracts out proteins from egg whites and the egg whites extract resins, sugars and volatiles from the myrrh. That leads to a serumlike product that has antiseptic and anti inflammatory properties and doubtless stimulates collagen progress, Nieuwoudt says. “It seems there’s a synergy between all of these different ingredients, and this is why it works.”
As for what deer velvet and bean flour might have been used for, the researchers are nonetheless teasing out outcomes. And they’ve but to sort out recipes with harmful components.
Eventually, the researchers hope to good their re-creations and convey the merchandise to drug retailer cabinets — minus, after all, any unsafe components. “I think people will want to go back to something that is natural, and it’s also appealing for people to think they’re using Renaissance products,” Nieuwoudt says. Until then, the sweetness for the researchers lies in “digging [the recipes] out and understanding them.”
