Had Miss Fipps not told her what they were, she would have taken them for ladies of fashion. In an age when women wore less than they had ever done but wore just as much blanc and rouge, there was little difference between the ladies in the side boxes and the ladies in the centre.

A guest at a party in 1764 was described as wearing on her face "rather too much yellow mixed with the red; she . . . would look very agreeable if she added blanc to the rouge instead of gamboge."

A white mask of cosmetic face paint, or blanc, had long been the norm for formally dressed ladies in the eighteenth century, but by the 1790s the deliberate artifice of the white mask was supplanted by a desire for a "natural" whiteness without additional coloring. "Rouge is no longer used; pallor is more interesting," wrote one commentator in 1804; "The ladies only use the blanc, and leave the rouge to the men."

Blanc

Meaning

Noun

Name

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