In his attack on cosmetics Thomas Tuke insists that ‘the Ceruse or white Lead, wherewith women use to paint themselves was, without doubt, brought in use by the divell, the capitall enemie of nature’. This clichéd analogy, used time and again by moralists, that painted ladies are like painted devils, draws upon the popular links made between poisonous ingredients, moral corruption and the female body. Curiously, this moral analogy is subverted in two Jacobean revenge tragedies by Thomas Middleton, The Revenger's Tragedy (1607) and The Second Maiden's Tragedy (1611). Politically poignant are these two tragedies that dramatise the exhumation of a mourned dead lady (one of them called ‘Gloriana’, the other simply known as ‘the Lady’), whose remains are subsequently painted and used to entrap and kill a sexually perverse tyrant, thereby transforming the notion that cosmetic paint is a corrosive material; instead it becomes a cleansing agent for the political body and a meta-theatrical device used to revalue cosmetic materiality within a theatrical context.

It has long been established that some poisons were key ingredients in mineral cosmetic recipes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and, therefore, a pervasive and realistic threat. Tanya Pollard's analysis of the role of poison in ‘cosmetic theater’ argues that early modern critics of cosmetics insisted that ‘women who adorn themselves with the material poisons of paint not only suffer from spiritual contamination, but translate this taint back into material poisons which they transmit to other victims’.