Emily Chan
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.”
