Though satirical and intentionally humorous, this colourful excerpt from Thomas Tuke's anti-cosmetic tract betrays an anxiety about woman's fundamental lack of readability. Tuke reveals an implicit distrust of artifice. To understand the relationship between cosmetic drama and early modern society, it is necessary to get to grips with the cultural reception of beautification found within the non-dramatic writing of the period. I want to suggest that from a wide range of early modern texts, what we see emerging is the formation of a culture of cosmetics that found its visual footing on the stage.

In the oppositional texts there are three primary objections to cosmetics: the belief that alteration of the body is a crime against God; the ethnocentric fear of foreign ingredients and commodities of a cosmetic nature; and the necromantic effect of face paint, which suggested not only the physical unreliability, but also the poisonous and contaminative nature of women and even art. Anti-cosmetic diatribes unearth a deeply rooted fear not just of cosmetic paint and its potential toxicity, but rather of what it signifies: gender, theatricality, race and the performative nature of political power.