The Oldest Lipstick Ever Found Happens To Be 3,600-Years-Old
Red lipstick is an important staple in anyone’s makeup bag. It’s also one of the few beauty products that can transcend time periods.
As a result, it has been around for thousands of years. According to a new archaeological find, it was even used in ancient times!
In southeastern Iran, red lipstick dating back to 3,600 years ago was recently recovered from a gravesite that had been looted. The Bronze Age makeup is known to be the oldest lipstick ever discovered.
The red lipstick was found in the Jiroft region of southeastern Iran. It was first uncovered in 2001, along with a number of other artifacts.
The Halil River had overflowed and flooded several graveyards from the 3rd millennium B.C.E. Locals scavenged the site for treasures, but the lipstick remained unclaimed and managed to make its way to a museum in the area,
The lipstick was contained in a vial that resembles the lipstick tubes of today. It was made of minerals like galena, anglesite, and hematite, which was darkened by manganite and braunite to create a waxy substance of a reddish hue.
It was similar to the formula for modern lipsticks and seemed to be used in much the same way.
“The vial’s slender shape and limited thickness suggest that it could have been conveniently held in one hand together with the handle of a copper/bronze mirror, leaving the other hand free to use a brush or another kind of applicator,” wrote the authors of the study, which was published in the journal Scientific Reports.
It is believed that the lipstick came from a Bronze Age civilization that occupied the nearby region, such as the ancient Marhaši.
prostooleh – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual person
The discovery has helped shed light on beauty routines in societies in ancient Iran. It provides a timeline for when the practice of wearing makeup began to arise.
Massimo Vidale, one of the study’s authors, noted that people wore makeup to impersonate “new official roles in the local hierarchies” during the early Bronze Age when the first cities and states were starting to gain more economic and political power.
He added that makeup was not only applied on the skin and around the eyes, but it is now known that the lips were painted as well.
This showed that Iranian women were “fully involved in the local display of power, beauty, and authority.”
The earliest documented evidence of women painting their lips comes from the Turin Papyrus, an ancient Egyptian papyrus scroll painting created in the 12th century B.C.E. It has been dubbed the “world’s first men’s magazine.”
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