During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, fashionable women wouldn’t consider travelling without a black velvet mask, called a vizard, to protect their complexion from the sun, from the dust kicked up by horses, and from gritty, polluted city air. Such a precaution may strike us as ironic, considering that many women were slathering their faces thickly with poisonous lead-filled makeup. (I’ve blogged about this before.) Poorer women might simply tie a cloth around their mouths and noses to keep out the worst of the dust.
Hardly any of these masks have survived, but the one in this picture was found during the renovation of a 16th-century stone building, inside a four-foot thick wall. It’s in the British Museum.
A lady kept her mask in place by a thick glass bead, which she would have held in her mouth.
According to this article, Queen Elizabeth’s masks were lined with perfumed leather.
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