Welcome to Pyxis & Spatula!

Affiliate Links

An ancient Greek pyxis from Athens, showing a wedding procession, made in the 5th century BCE . Now in the British Museum.
© Marie-Lan Nguyen/Wikimedia Commons

Welcome to Pyxis & Spatula, where I combine my research in ancient Mediterranean history and archaeology with my interest in beauty products and beauty culture. (You can find my take on modern beauty products on my other blog, brutally honest beauty.) Personally, I know the Romans better than the Greeks or Egyptians (plus, we have the most Roman literature that discusses cosmetics), so this place might be a bit heavy on the Roman side.

The blog's name comes from two pieces of beauty equipment that were often used by ancient women.* A pyxis is a lidded box, usually made from pottery, that could have held any number of things including jewelry, hair accessories, or cosmetics. We think that they were used especially by women, because they're so often decorated with scenes of women getting dressed and doing their hair and makeup, or with wedding scenes like the one on the pyxis above showing a bride and groom in their wedding procession. Lots of ancient products designed for women were decorated with scenes like these. Not all makeup containers were as fancy as the one above--for instance, check out this Roman metal face cream jar with the cream still inside.

Just like some people still do today, ancient women used spatulas or spoons to scoop product out of their jars and to mix cosmetics on palettes. The image in the blog's logo is actually a spoon (not a spatula) that the Romans called a cochlear, because it was good for eating snails or shellfish. But it came in a variety of sizes and could have been used for beauty products as well.

I have all sorts of ideas for topics that I want to write about here: lead in ancient cosmetics; how beautiful Cleopatra really was; ancient skincare ingredients that we still use today; Roman eyebrow grooming techniques; ideals of "natural" beauty in Greece, Roman, and Egypt; ancient figure flattery advice; and I'll probably try to do some easy tutorials based on ancient makeup trends. But if there's anything ancient you're curious about, I would love to hear from you. I'd really appreciate any suggestions. I hope there are some people our there who find the stuff I write about here as fascinating as I do. Thanks for reading!

Below I've included a widget with some really good books on the subject of beauty and cosmetics around the ancient Mediterranean. If you're doing serious research on the topic, you should check those out (since a blog like this isn't a proper "scholarly" research source--which isn't to say I'm not careful about the information I present here).

(*Note that I mainly talk about women using beauty products on this blog, because most of the ancient evidence we have links cosmetics specifically to women. The ancient Greeks and Romans were pretty strict about their gender roles. That isn't to say that no ancient male person ever used and enjoyed makeup, but it's nearly impossible to talk about them, because we don't have much of an idea of what an ancient man who used beauty products was trying to achieve. So when I say, here, "an ancient woman used this product," I am not saying "only a woman could have used this product." I am saying that, since we have to rely on limited information, evidence suggests that this product was most likely used by a woman or, at least, by someone interested in enhancing their femininity. At some point I hope to write a post here about gender identity and beauty in the ancient world that will look at the topic in more detail.)