Cosmetics for the Female Face
Medicamina faciei femineae
Headnote
The Medicamina Faciei Femineae (Cosmetics for the Female Face) is Ovid’s shortest and least-read love-poem: a fragment of about a hundred elegiac verses, written around AD 2, that survives only as the opening of what was once a longer didactic poem on women’s beauty-care. It is the purest specimen of Ovid’s mock-instructional manner — the praeceptor who lectures on seduction in the Ars Amatoria here turns the same deadpan technical seriousness on facial cosmetics, treating the compounding of a face-cream with all the gravity Virgil brought to bees and vines in the Georgics. The comedy is in the register: the genuine recipes — measured out in pounds, sixths of an as, and scruples — are delivered as solemn doctrine, and the joke and the argument are one.
The poem falls cleanly in two. The first half is a verse essay in defense of cultus — cultivation, polish, adornment: cultivation tamed the wild earth and sweetened the bitter fruit, gilds the high roofs and dyes the Tyrian wool, so why should women not refine themselves? The rough Sabine matrons of King Tatius’ day spun and tended the hearth, but your mothers bore you tender daughters, who want gold-worked cloth and Eastern pearls — and there is no shame in it, Ovid says, for the men are groomed now too. He warns, in passing, against love-magic and witches’ herbs (the snake split by Marsian chant, the bronze clashed to rescue the eclipsed Moon), and then lands the moral point that braces the whole frivolous enterprise: let character be the first care, for age will plough the fairest face with wrinkles, while goodness lasts and love hangs securely on it.
The second half is the recipe-book proper: a sequence of genuine cosmetic formulae — a brightening paste of hulled barley, vetch, eggs, ground stag’s-horn, narcissus bulbs, gum, and honey; a second of roasted lupines and beans with white-lead, red nitre, and Illyrian iris-root; a blemish-paste of "halcyon" bound with Attic honey; and a complexion-cream of frankincense, nitre, gum, myrrh, fennel, dried rose, and sal ammoniac, worked up with barley-cream — closing on the glimpse of a woman grinding poppies in cold water to redden her cheeks. The text breaks off there; the rest of Ovid’s beauty-manual is lost.
This English is translated from the Latin (the Perseus/PHI text). It renders the surviving hundred verses line for verse, preserving the elegiac couplet so each pentameter still lands its turn, and keeps the straight-faced how-to tone of the recipes intact; the Roman weights and measures (the as, the ounce, the scruple), the divine and geographic names (Ceres, Juno’s peacock, Tyre, Temesa, Illyria, Attica), and the technical ingredients are left to stand in the line, with the glossary, not an inline note, carrying the unpacking.
and by what method your beauty is to be kept.
Cultivation bade the barren ground render the gifts
of Ceres, and the biting brambles perished.
Cultivation, too, mends the sour juices in the fruit,
and the cleft tree takes on adopted wealth.
What is groomed gives pleasure. High roofs are overlaid with gold;
the black earth hides beneath the marble laid upon it;
the same fleece is dyed, again and again, in the Tyrian cauldron;
India furnishes carved ivory for our luxuries.
would rather their fathers’ fields were tilled than themselves:
when the matron, ruddy-faced, pressing her high seat,
spun her unceasing task with a hard thumb,
and herself penned the lambs her daughter had pastured,
herself laid the brushwood and cut logs on the hearth.
But your mothers bore you tender daughters.
You want your bodies covered in gold-worked cloth,
you want to vary your scented hair in its setting,
you want a hand made conspicuous with gems;
you load on your neck stones fetched from the East,
and two so heavy it is a labor for the ear to bear them.
since our age keeps its men well-groomed too.
Your husbands are burnished by a woman’s rule,
and the bride has scarcely anything to add to their grooming.
Each woman decks herself for herself, nor does it matter
what loves she hunts; elegance earns no reproach.
In the country they hide, and still they dress their hair; though steep
Athos hide them, lofty Athos will have them groomed.
There is a pleasure, too, in having pleased oneself, for anyone;
to girls their own beauty is dear and welcome.
and the bird preens, swelling, in its beauty.
Let love urge you so, rather than potent herbs
that a witch’s hand cuts away with her terrible art.
Trust not in grasses, nor in mingled juice,
nor try the noxious slime of a mare in heat;
no snakes are split through the middle by Marsian chants,
nor does the water run back, reversed, into its springs;
and though someone clash away the bronze of Temesa,
never will the Moon be shaken from her horses.
A face pleases when the nature behind it wins favor.
Love of character is sure: age will lay waste to beauty,
and the face that pleased will be furrowed, ploughed by wrinkles.
A time will come when it will shame you to have looked in the mirror,
and grief will come as a second cause of wrinkles.
Goodness is enough, and endures into a long age,
and through all its years love hangs securely on it.
your bright face may be made to shine.
The barley that Libyan farmers sent by ship,
strip it of the chaff and of its husks.
Let an equal measure of vetch be steeped in ten eggs:
but let the bare barley heap up two pounds.
When these have been dried in the gusting air,
bid the slow she-ass break them on the rough millstone;
and the first horns that fall from the long-lived stag,
grind into these (let a sixth of a whole as go in).
And now, once they have been blended to a dusty flour,
at once sift the whole of it in the hollow sieves.
Add twice six bulbs of narcissus, stripped of their skin,
which a brisk right hand should grind on clean marble.
Let it draw a sixth-part of gum with Tuscan seed:
into this let nine times as much honey go for you.
Whatever woman treats her face with such a salve
will shine smoother than her own mirror.
and at the same time parch the beans that bloat the body;
let each have six pounds, in equal division,
give each to be crushed small on the black millstones.
Let neither white-lead fail you, nor the foam of red nitre,
nor the iris that comes from Illyrian soil.
Give them alike to be worked by the strong arms of young men:
but an ounce will be the right weight for the ground mass.
drives blemishes from the face: halcyon-paste they call it.
If you ask with what weight of it I am content,
it is what an ounce, cut in two parts, draws.
That they may bind, and be smeared fitly over the body,
add Attic honey from the golden combs.
not all of it, even so, is to be given to the kindled hearths.
When you have mixed frankincense with the nitre that scrapes off pimples,
make it, by just weights, a third-part on either side.
A quarter-part less of gum, stripped from its bark,
and add a small cube of rich myrrh.
When you have ground these, sift them through the close holes:
the powder must be pressed firm with poured-in honey.
It has helped, too, to add fennel to the sweet-smelling myrrh,
(let the fennel draw five scruples, the myrrh nine)
and as much dried rose as a single hand may grasp,
and male frankincense with sal ammoniac.
let the frankincense with the salt match the roses in measure.
Though for a short time only it lies smeared on the soft face,
a rich color will cling over the whole face.
I have seen a woman who, soaking poppies in cold water,
would grind them, and smear them on her tender cheeks.