Today we're here at Wroxeter Roman City, which is cared for by English Heritage

During the third century when

Britain was part of the once powerful Roman Empire, this was one of the largest

cities in the country. From tradespeople to trendsetters, Wroxeter was a thriving

metropolis of power, politics and pampering. Today we're going to be

exploring the Roman beauty trends that quite literally changed the face of

Britain. We're going to show you how you can recreate a Roman-inspired look at

home, and we're going to be taking a look at some makeup artefacts found right

here at Wroxeter.

So what are we waiting for? Let's explore Roman Britain

Rebecca, hello!

Hi Amber, it's nice to see you again

Nice to see you too. Now today is very exciting. Britain was a province of the

Roman Empire for around 400 years from 43 AD. Today we're here at

Wroxeter Roman City which was the fourth largest city in Roman Britain,

comparable in size to Pompeii in Italy. So it was a really busy, bustling

thriving place to live and work. Now what's especially exciting for us is

that there have been a lot of cosmetic artefacts found here on the site as well

so we'll be looking into those later. Now tell me about the Roman look that we're

going to recreate today.

Well we know the Roman Empire was big and it existed for a long time.

So we decided to take a starting point and our starting point is

a woman called Julia Domna. She was the wife of Emperor Septimius Severus in the

3rd century AD and we're going to be creating a Roman style look on our

beautiful model Sarah - hello - and let's get started

Great

Now many people in Roman Britain would have known about Julia Domna due to her

status as the Empress, the Emperor's wife. So how are we going to bring this look to life?

Well we're going to start at a point that I always think of when I think of

the Romans and that is bathing and cleanliness

The Romans were famous, I guess, for their bathing process and actually it's really

interesting because if you've been to a spa or you've been to a hammam a lot of

the processes you see in spas today are really, really similar to what

the Romans were using. So you would have cold rooms, steam rooms, saunas, warm rooms

and massages and maybe some beauty therapists

Sounds lovely doesn't it?

Yeah, I'm glad I came

So we're going to start our

first step in the Roman bathing ritual by massaging Sarah's arm with a little

bit of oil. We're using just a cheap olive oil

At this stage I would like your arm please, yes

So oil is what helps to start the cleaning process. So we'll massage it in

While I'm doing this I think it's really interesting to think about how

important appearance was to Romans

Well appearance, bathing, grooming all of these

things are really important for Roman and Roman British identity and all

aspects of the way you present yourself could sort of signal things like gender,

maybe your rank if you were in the military, amulets might be worn for

protection so a variety of different things

Now also something that really shows the importance of grooming is toilette sets

that have been found including things like tweezers and nail cleaners as well

which people might wear on their person. So it just really shows the importance of

keeping a clean body

Yeah it's really interesting that tools for beauty seem

to be really important part of the Roman process and there's one tool that I'm

excited to be using

On me?

Yeah, on you!

This is a strigil and this was used by slaves in the baths to clean the skin

So once you've massage oil into the skin, maybe then you'd go off and do some more

bathing or some exercise or some swimming, and then your slave would take

the strigil and they run it down the skin and this removes the oil and the grease

and the dirt. Oil is a really effective cleanser we still use it today

and most modern skincare line-ups have an oil cleanser because oil is lipophilic

and that means it attracts like, it attracts itself and it tracks dirt so

it's super, super effective way of cleansing and also exfoliating the skin

So in the age before YouTube and Instagram and magazines how did the

Romans get their information about new trends and styles?

Well luckily for us we do have quite a few images of Julia Domna

One source in particular that

we can draw on is coins. Now coins were a great way for the ruling family to

disseminate their image, to show how they wanted to be presented to really relay

their power. Women on coins tended to be either goddesses or empresses like Julia

But what's particularly useful for us is that it also shows us what

hairstyles were current as well

Well, we'll do the next step in our Roman

skincare regime and I'm going to moisturise your skin using something

which we know as lanolin. Now lanolin is the grease from sheep's wool which

sounds a bit disgusting, but it's an incredibly effective moisturiser it's

really, really emollient and you can feel it's really quite heavy and sticky but

it actually contains a lot of ingredients that in modern day skincare

we really look out for. So it's got a AHAs and BHAs - alpha hydroxy acids, beta hydroxy acids

These are incredible for your skin, so your skin will feel

fantastic. But it might be a little bit smelly

A couple of writers in Rome complained about the smell of their wives and

girlfriends using lanolin on their skin

But you might be pleased to know that this

is not the smelliest or weirdest ingredient that we could have used on

you today. In some parts of the Roman Empire there was an ingredient

called 'crocodilea' that was used. Reports vary as to whether that's the

intestines of a crocodile

or the dung of a crocodile - oh no! - that you would spread on your face

I don't want to be a Roman

But it would tighten and tone your skin, interested yet?

No!

Ok!

Now one thing we should keep in mind is that as with today women in Roman Britain do not form

a homogeneous group. The Roman Empire is huge geographically and there's a lot of

movement within it as well. So we've got people coming here from the

Mediterranean, from the Middle East like Julia Domna from Syria and from North Africa

as well. And that's on top of the groups who are here already when

the Romans arrived like the Cornovii tribe who were living around the area of Wroxeter

The Roman Empire was really international wasn't it?

It really was and we see that in some of the textile fragments that remain as well

For example we see Chinese silks or silks made with Chinese yarns that have been

found on sites in Colchester, just incredible. And it's thought that

cosmetics could have been imported from as far away as Egypt which was also a

Roman province at the time as well. So travel and trade was really, really

extensive at this point

It's incredible how far things could travel within the

Empire. But there's something that we have that I think is really exciting that is

we think exclusive to Britain. It's a Roman cosmetics grinder. This is a replica.

It's so fascinating! So you would take your mortar and into your mortar

you'd put a piece of charcoal or perhaps antimony or maybe even soot, which is

what some Romans use to create an eyeliner or a kohl. And then you would

take your pestle and you'd grind it up to make a powder,

you'd perhaps put a drop of oil or fat into there, and then this grinder is so

specially shaped that it fits on the eye so you can use this actually as your

makeup applicator

Now this look in particular that we associate with Julia Domna;

the dark eyes, the dark brows, we see this in depictions of women in

the later Roman era as well throughout the empire, so it was clearly very popular

Well I'm going to leave you getting to grips with that, and I'm going

to go and find out more about the cosmetic artefacts that have been found

here at Wroxeter so I will see you later

Have fun!

Cameron tell me about your work as a Curator with English Heritage

I'm the Curator of Collections for the West Midlands. I look after the things that

are on display at the sites in the various site museums and for the large

collection of material that is held in warehouses across the country

Now you've done some work specifically looking at Roman cosmetics that have been found

here at Wroxeter. Tell me how that came about

The first proper excavations took place here in the 1910s and the 1920s, and that material hadn't really

been re-examined for a long time. And when I recently came back to go

through those collections, I found three items that had previously been described as 'lunate pendants',

the kind of thing that would hang from a necklace

And now we know that those are actually little cosmetic sets, grinding

sets that were used for eye makeup in the Roman period

Amazing and are they specific to Britain?

They are specific to Britain, yes, and you start to see

them in the 1st century AD and they do seem to be a response within this

country to the import of cosmetics and ideas about personal beauty that

coming here from the Mediterranean

I'm really excited to see some of these

objects, what have you brought with you today?

Well here are two components of two different cosmetic grinder sets they

come in little sets but you tend to find them individually because people take

them apart from each other to use them

What other cosmetic items do we have?

We have a surprising number of cosmetic items. We have nail cleaners, a wide

variety of nail cleaners; we have tweezers, depilation was a big thing

hairlessness was was very attractive and one of my personal favourites is this

little perfume bottle, we have loads of perfume bottles

What else do these discoveries tell us about Roman life?

I think they really tell us that Roman life was urban life

and that when the Romans came they brought with them this

whole range of new influences and new materials and new consumer goods that

simply did not exist before in this country

Cameron thank you so much

We're midway through our transformation so I'm going go and see how they're getting on

Thank you

Bye

Oh wow! Look at that, it's so bright

I love it!

We're finally using some colour, I'm very excited

We've got some written evidence that suggests that Roman women would use

ground-up precious stones or minerals to create eyeshadows,

so maybe using lapis lazuli or malachite

or azulite, sometimes even saffron as well, ground-up maybe with a touch of

oil to create you know an eyeshadow

Now I did do some grinding. I ground some lapis lazuli

and this is what you get. It's a really, really beautiful color

But I'm not actually using it on Sarah because I didn't actually want to put granules of rock on

her eyes because my grinding skills are not the best, so I'm using a modern

equivalent which is a brightly coloured pigment powder

So gorgeous!

And it looks amazing

I'm applying it with my finger and I also mocked up a bit of speculation as to

what a Roman eyeshadow blender might look like. This is bit of lamb's wool

with some wool lashed onto a stick - lovely! - for blending out the edges

Incredible! Well the Roman world would have been a really vibrant place. We tend to think of

people as just wearing white at this time and I think there are a couple of

reasons behind this. Firstly it's because of statues which now are white, but at

the time would mostly have been painted in quite bright colors but this has kind

of tainted our idea of what the ancient world looked like. In fact we have

writing from Ovid in 'The Art of Love' and he talks about woolen clothes in a

number of different colours; saffron, amethyst, green, sky blue, watercolor which

sounds lovely, chestnut, almond - it really would have

been a rainbow, bright, vibrant place to live

Let's finish this look off with

some lips and cheeks and I'm adding a small amount of colour

This is modern, safe version of vermillion, mixed with goose fat and beeswax

So hairstyles were a really important aspect of display in the Roman world

What are you going to do to Sarah's hair today?

We're going to be using a wig

today and it's not necessarily the case that every single woman would have used

a wig to get these elaborate styles, but wigs were used in the Roman Empire

Well hairstyles were clearly very important in Roman Britain because hair pins are

one of the most common sight finds that we find around the country and this

actually started to die out towards the end of the 4th century and

it's been suggested that that could be because it was at this period where

Christianity began to become quite widespread so ideas around modesty and