I am mixing beeswax and olive oil to make my moisturizer
Romans used moisturizers before they applied any makeup, much like we do today. It usually consisted of beeswax, olive oil, and fragrance, but I just used beeswax and olive oil. It took me a while to melt the wax, because when I pulled it out of the microwave, it started hardening really fast, so it took a couple heatings to get most of the wax into my container. Mixing the wax and olive oil together was difficult and messy, but once they were mixed, I got a nice creamy consistency, and it looked and felt like some of the moisturizers I buy at the store.
Romans liked to make their eyelids and eyebrows dark using eyeliner. They would burn metals over a flame and scrape off the dark soot left behind. The compounds in these metals contains oxide. I used a stainless steel spoon, which contains Chromium oxide. When this metal is heated over a flame, the oxide is released, leaving behind the dark soot of that compound. Making this eyeliner was especially difficult because I had to burn the spoon to get the black metal soot, but when I tried to scrape it off, hardly any black soot made it in my container and so eventually I stopped trying after about four attempts and just left the soot on the spoon and rubbed it off with my fingers.
moisturizer, red rock (blush), eyeshadow, and burnt spoon (eyeliner)
I was not actually able to make the blush, but I did obtain the material it was mostly composed of ground up dried red clay. The red tint comes from a substance called ochre, which is hydrated Iron oxide, more commonly known as rust. The Romans would dry out this clay and grind it on a stone pallet to get a fine powder, which is easily applied with a brush, just like what we do today. Sometimes they would bake the clay before grinding it to enhance the bright red color. Since I did not have a stone pallet or any surface hard enough to grind a rock on, I found a red rock and placed it with the rest of my hand crafted makeup.
Eyeshadow in Rome was popular in two, colors, blue and green. It was made up of ground up stones, minerals, and soot. The rocks commonly used were azurite for blue and malachite for green, which was poisonous. I did not have these stones or minerals, so I used colored chalk and mixed it with soot. I obtained the soot by burning down a popsicle stick. The eyeshadow I made looked and applied just like the eyeshadow I have, except it was a lot harder to get off because the of the soot.
Burning spoons was an interesting process, and I got some funny looks from onlookers.
