I'm here at Osborne on the Isle of Wight to follow in the royal foosteps of Queen Victoria.

Osborne was the holiday home for the Queen and her family through much of the 19th century

and today it's cared for by English Heritage.

Victoria retreated here away from the prying eyes of the public but today we have a special invitation

So join us as we recreate another history inspired look and find out more about

the Queen, her home and the country she ruled over.

Hello!

Hey Amber, how's it going?

Good thanks. So today, Queen Victoria. Now she reigned from 1837 to 1901 and after Queen Elizabeth II

she's actually our longest reigning monarch to date.

We're here in the glorious surroundings of Osbourne her holiday home so Rebecca

what look are you going to do for us today?

On our beautiful model, Hollie, I'm going to be creating a Queen Victoria inspired makeup look.

You can see from Victoria's various portraits that her look was very much a fair but not excessively white,

skin a little flush of color in the cheeks and very neat well groomed hair

So it's kind of the, it's the ultimate no makeup makeup tutorial that we're going to do today

Lovely!

There's a quote going round that Victoria herself thought that makeup was vulgar

Now while we don't know the while we don't know the source of that quote what we do know is

in the Victorian era makeup became much less obvious

It became much more subtle

And so where would she have worn a look like the one you're going to create?

Well, let's imagine that Holly is going to be

getting ready to have her portrait painted so that she needs to look very elegant

So let's start with the first part of our makeup tutorial and we'll talk

skin care and skin prep.

Here at Osborne if you go upstairs to Queen Victoria's

Dressing Room you can see her dressing table and her wash stand and I'm so

curious I really want to know what's in all those little pots. It's tricky to

know what Victoria wore on her face, but we do have some really nice quotes

from and Frieda Arnold who was one of her dresses at the time who said the

Queen liked to go to her dressing table around 8 o'clock in the evening when the

maids will have set out some elderflower water

for her to wash her face and hands and also some chamomile tea for her to bathe

her eyes. So let's start with some chamomile tea to bathe the eyes if you

keep your eyes closed for me Hollie.

Is that soothing? How does it feel?

Yeah, it's lovely.

Chamomile is really known for being soothing and calming and

I'm sure Victoria would have appreciated this after a long day of

state affairs, horse riding and walking around Osborne

And now let's wash that face with some elderflower water

After Victoria's had her skin prepped and cleansed

we'll then move on to the next step which is kind of a foundation base

Now we just stepped outside to do Hollie's base because we can't use loose powder

in a historical building. I've got a brush with almost nothing on it just for

some touch-ups. And we've used zinc oxide now one of the strongest differences for

Victorian makeup is the move away from a really heavy white painted base and the

move away from using white lead as that base.

Zinc oxide came in and replaced

white lead and it was great because it's sheer, it still gives you that slightly white finish

Most importantly it won't kill you - Yay! - when you wear it

which is brilliant

We still use zinc oxide in makeup today. You'll see it most often in

sunscreen products and you'll probably see that if you've ever put a high

factor sunscreen on your skin you can see that kind of white cast

Oh that sort of chalky nature?

Yeah.

Now if you could get your hands on zinc oxide brilliant if you can't get your hands on

zinc oxide sometimes middle-class - working-class women might use things

like starch or maybe chalk dust to make their faces look lighter or they might

resort to some recipes that they've seen in books or magazines.

We see a real rise in magazines in this period. The Industrial Revolution sees a huge

expansion of the middle-class and along with this a lot of journal sort of

etiquette journals beauty fashion manuals to help people negotiate their

new social position. And one of note in particular that comes from the period

we're looking at - the 1850s - is the English Woman's Domestic magazine.

This was published by Samuel Beaton who was the husband of Isabella Beaton who was

famous for her book of household management.

Of course, Mrs Beeton!

Exactly! So this would cover it was aimed squarely at a middle class audience that

would cover all of these areas and even some political commentary as well,

and fiction, all kinds of things for middle-class Victorian women to read

But not everyone was so prosperous at this time, were they?

No definitely not

The Industrial Revolution also caused huge amounts of poverty and squalor in some

urban areas and also tuberculosis. This claimed sixty to seventy thousand lives

in each decade of Victoria's reign

It was a serious epidemic in Queen Victoria's reign, but also tuberculosis

formed kind of a beauty movement

People thought that the symptoms of tuberculosis were beautiful

The hectic flush cheek, a pale skin and also brightened eyes and because tuberculosis

was thought to be beautiful, women may have started to emulate some of the symptoms

So they wore more white powder to give them that pale look, they

might have added more rouge for the for the flush of a fever and they also might

have used belladonna which is a chemical that makes your pupils dilate

Dilated pupils can be a sign of sickness and it also is believed to make women look

more attractive

I'm not going to use belladonna, you'll be grateful to hear

I'm going to use just some good old eyedrops, so if you would pop your head

back for me let's pop some eyedrops in here and see if we can give you that

consumptive chic

There we go

So shiny

One might almost say glassy

Women didn't necessarily wear a lot of product around their eyes at this time

Kohl was considered vulgar and also not worth the deception, so something simple and more

natural was often used maybe it might be castor oil on the eyebrows and the

eyelashes to give them a gloss and a shine and to help them grow longer and stronger

We're now onto the cheeks stage of our makeup and I'm going to be using

our good old friend rouge

Now rouge has been around in many forms for hundreds of years and in the Victorian era

there were quite a few different forms of rouge even though it was very subtly used

The version that I'm going to use is a liquid rouge and this was often made using

either vegetable color maybe

beetroot or possibly carmine which is derived from cochineal beetles mixed with

alcohol and water and I read one source that suggests that you apply the liquid rouge

with a hankerchief. I've never never done this before so let's see how

hankerchief application works

It's not bad!

Now while we don't know whether Victoria herself wore rouge, she does make a couple of mentions

to it in her diary, specifically other people wearing it

and mentioning that they look better for wearing a little bit of rouge

So maybe she wasn't too against makeup

Lips are really natural in this era. Some people said that rosy lips were the

reward of temperate living and exercise outdoors. We're gonna use a rose-tinted lip salve

There were loads of recipes for how to create your own lip salves

but also this was the era where makeup started to be mass-produced and the

first commercially available lipstick in a tube was available towards the end of

the 19th century

Mass-production was really impacting fashion at this time as well

In the 1850s the cage crinoline is developed using rings of steel and this

is called the first industrial fashion because of the way it was manufactured

And it said that by the early 1860s apparently one seventh of the weekly output of

steel in Sheffield actually went towards making these crinolines

So it was a very you know huge fashion at this time. Queen Victoria apparently

even succumbed to the cage crinoline just once when it was really, really hot

too hot to wear her layers and layers and layers of petticoats that she

otherwise would have warden to create the same silhouettes.

Now we've got our Queen Victoria inspired face, let's move on to something that's very iconic for

Queen Victoria and that was her hair and her hairstyles. Now Victoria would have

her hair done by a maid in the morning just into a simple twist and then her

iconic hairstyle was created by her hairdressers. She had up to two

hairdressers on retainer any one time that would do her hair daily and her

very neat, plaited, low bun style reflects that Victorian sensibility of modesty

and simplicity, but also that having loose hair meant

that you might also have loose morals

Ah yes Victoria and Albert styled

themselves as a very respectable couple so no loose hair to be seen on Victoria

But it is quite relevant for our beachside setting here at Osborne because the

seaside was one of the places where you might actually come across loose hair

and some of ideas of loose morality that go alongside that.

The seaside starts to impact your wardrobe as well

You would pack specific seaside dresses for your

trip and these would be a bit more outlandish than fashions that you might

wear in the city centre so maybe striped or maybe with a sort of a nautical touch

as you can see here

Now while you work on the hair, I am going to go and find out much more about

Victoria's reign, so I'll see you guys later

See you later

Michael this is quite the holiday home what can you tell me about Osborne?

Well, Osborne was built by Victoria and Albert as a private family home they had recently

got married so like any newly married couple I guess

they wanted a place of their own not a state residence this was a private

family home somewhere where they could escape to from the pressures of court

life in London and Windsor.

Victoria is known as a ruler who had a very strict moral code

How did her upbringing impact that?

She had quite a strict upbringing. She was brought up by her mother, her father had

died when she was just you know not even a year old and her mother was really

reacting I suppose against the loose morals of the previous Georgian period

and Queen Victoria remembered her childhood as a rather melancholy affair

really, a rather lonely affair.

And so that must have also influenced the way

that she felt about family and children as well if she was brought up on her own?

Yes, I mean I think because she didn't really have much of a normal family life

herself she in turn reacted against this and when she married Albert and they had

children of their own they wanted to create this sort of idyllic happy family

life something that neither Victoria or Albert had really had themselves as children

Victoria's reign is known as a huge period of change especially

with the Industrial Revolution. What are the global ramifications of this?

I think the technological changes were huge. There was an outlook, it was possible to

look outward much more and communicate globally and of course this led to the

building up of a huge empire during Victoria's reign and it's appropriate

that we're standing in this room talking at the moment, this fabulous Indian interior

because India became a part of a very important central part of

Victoria's Empire so much so that she became Empress of India in the 1870s

What kind clothes with Victoria have worn here at Osborne?

The kind of clothes she wore were comparatively relaxed, Osborne

being a family home there wasn't this formality of dress here that there would

have been elsewhere, no crowns and tiaras for instance. So floaty summer dresses,

muslins, light silks that sort of thing

And you have some items of clothing here

that Victoria actually wore. What can you tell me about them?

We've got a night dress that we know that she wore. It's monogrammed with her V R with a crown on the top

Wow! It's my dream to have monogrammed pyjamas

You must! You must!

We've also got a couple of pairs of stockings a white pair and a black pair

both of which have got again the Queen's initials on the top. The black pair were

probably morning stockings I think I mean famously Queen Victoria spent most

of her later years as a widow

Thanks so much Michael I'm gonna go and see how

our Victoria is coming together

Pleasure

Oh wow Hollie, you look amazing! Rebecca well done this is fantastic

What a transformation. I absolutely love this look it's so ideal, the lace is great

Victoria loved lace, she even collected antique lace and she had some specially

commissioned Honiton lace from Devon for her wedding dress which she rewore again

and again throughout her life at various events. She was also known to wear lilac as well