Beauty care routines from the Renaissance until today

What did personal hygiene look like in the 16th century – and why does studying it take us right to the heart of art, medicine, and social order? Art historian Romana Sammern focuses on the close intertwining of beauty, knowledge, and everyday life in the early modern period – and reveals how traces of this can still be seen in contemporary beauty routines.

Culture and Society

by Ania Gleich

December 22, 2025

What did beauty care and personal hygiene involve in the 16th century? What remedies, rituals, and settings influenced the beauty ideal of the time? And which of them are surprisingly close to today's beauty routines? Romana Sammern explores these questions in the FWF-funded project Face and Image. Cosmetics and Art, 1500–1800. Her findings paint a colorful picture of the early modern period that has been overlooked until now. Sammern, a historian and cultural scientist, intends her “beauty studies” to lay the foundations for a field of research that has received little attention to date.

At the heart of her work is the realization that beauty care, personal hygiene, and knowledge were not merely separate, coexisting phenomena at that time. She reveals that these areas are really so closely intertwined that ostensible analogies – between painting and makeup, for instance – only scratch the surface. Sammern speaks of an intertwining “that goes far beyond such parallels” and in fact involves “art, natural history, philosophy, medicine, and pharmacology” all at the same time. This overlap creates a focus area that stretches well outside its time and even affects today's discourse on beauty.

Beauty Studies

The project “Face and Image: Cosmetics and Art. 1500–1800” provided the basis for the special exhibition “The Art of Beauty” in autumn 2025 at Ambras Castle in Tyrol. The research findings of art historian Romana Sammern can be found in the exhibition catalog an numerous other publications.

Where the arts, the body, and knowledge interact

The foundation for Romana Sammern's research was laid when she chanced upon a discovery at the British Library: she found what she believed to be a translation of a Mannerist art treatise by the painter Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo. Upon closer inspection, however, the text turned out to be an independent compilation of texts on art theory, natural history, and medicine and, surprisingly, contained a chapter on cosmetics that did not exist in the original. The reasons for this intertwining of art and cosmetics are the subject of Sammern’s investigations in the FWF project.

In this project, Sammern reveals how art, personal hygiene, medicine, and natural history in the 16th century did not merely coexist but were in fact interconnected. “We know, for example, that painters and pharmacists at that time used identical ingredients for artistic creation and for cosmetics,” explains Sammern, “and of course there were writings on cosmetics and art theory that compared the painting of faces with the painting of panels.”

What is crucial for Sammern is the fact that these overlaps are not only metaphorical, but also verifiable in physical and practical terms. Evidence is found, for instance, in the numerous recipe books of the time, which bring together remedies and everyday practices. A particularly revealing source is a 16th-century book on medicine and cosmetics by Philippine Welser, the wife of Ferdinand II. Personal care is embedded in dietetics and lifestyle as well as in medical theory and culture: a system of knowledge that seems like a seismograph of social ideas. Ideal portraits, such as Botticelli's Simonetta Vespucci, are clear illustrations of this aspect: they show ideal states of the body, which at the same time provide insights into historical concepts of body regulation. Beauty was not merely an aesthetic ideal, but testified to constitution and status.

How personal hygiene shapes gender

And this is precisely where another central aspect of Sammern's research comes in: personal grooming not only shaped the body, but also gender and social roles. She illustrates this with a portrait of Ferdinand II by Francesco Terzio, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, in which the Archduke of Tyrol is clearly portrayed as having a sanguine temperament, “the most ideal of the humoral temperaments,” as the art historian points out. Sammern explains how his hands and neatly trimmed beard reveal that intentional personal care routines were clearly visible in the 16th century and were informed by purely fashionable ideals.

Such details also show how physical appearance was carefully designed to convey inner health and harmony, and how this visibility in turn served to underpin social and political claims to power. They also illustrate that grooming practices were by no means exclusively female. A large number of recipes for male beard care and dyes exist, as well as for permanent hair removal for men and women. Sammern cites the example of tonsure, the circular shaving of the crown of the head, which monks adopted to signify their affiliation with their monastic community.

Hence, personal care was a unisex field impacted by social roles, religious identities and gender images. Knowing this, one can appreciate that cosmetics not only expressed status and gender, but also created them in the first place. At the same time, it must be taken into account that a large part of the written evidence from this period was authored by men – both art theory texts and printed tracts. “When it comes to manuscripts, on the other hand, there are very, very many statements by women,” Sammern emphasizes – and there is still a considerable need for research.

Present-day impact

The evolution from the early modern period to the present day reveals a contradictory picture: some ideals and practices of beauty have persisted for centuries, while others have changed radically. The ideal of (artificial) “natural beauty,” for example, which is still visible today in the modern “no-makeup” look, dates back to antiquity, as Sammern explains. “There are very long traditions in personal care in general,” she says. At the same time, clear differences emerge. Individualized and commercialized today, care was back then a joint endeavor: “You don't make anything on your own, you don't apply it on your own. Recipes are passed down, copied, bought, or given away.”

This communal aspect was also evident in who produced and passed on cosmetics products. The women at the court of Ambras Castle, for instance, worked closely with the personal physicians and produced medicines and care products themselves – using the kitchen as their laboratory. The products were distributed throughout the large household, given to poorer subjects, or sent off as diplomatic gifts. The emerging picture is one of personal care as gender-specific knowledge production that went far beyond hygiene and cosmetics.

Sammern notes, however, that these findings are only the beginning. “There is still a lot to be learned,” she says. By establishing an international scientific network, she hopes to collectively fill these gaps and establish beauty studies as a permanent field of research. Together with Montserrat Cabré and Erin Griffey she set up an open working group on “Beauty Studies in the Premodern World” at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, which began its work in October.

About the researcher

Romana Sammern studied history, cultural studies, and art history in Salzburg, Vienna, and Berlin. After positions at the IFK Vienna and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, she earned her doctorate at Humboldt University in Berlin with a thesis on representations of prostitutes in the early modern period (published as Hurenbilder, 2014). In 2024, she acquired the venia docendi at the University of Passau on “Beauty, Art, and the Body in the Early Modern Period.” Since 2019, she has been a senior scientist at the interuniversity institution Wissenschaft und Kunst (Science and Art) between the University of Salzburg and Mozarteum University.

Set to run until February 2026, the project “Face and Image: Cosmetics and Art. 1500–1800” was awarded EUR 275,000 in funding from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). Inter alia, it provided the basis for the special exhibition “The Art of Beauty” in autumn 2025 at Ambras Castle in Tyrol. In addition to several publications from the project, the exhibition catalog includes the article “The Art of Beauty: Zur langen Geschichte von Kunst und Körperpflege,” published by Walther König (2025).