Maleficent ointments

II. Magic in women’s daily lives

In Roman culture, women used to have among their belongings jars of various materials to store cosmetic products for personal grooming. Archeology offers a significant number of testimonies, as the one in the image, and the variety of their materials, formats and ornamentation shows the extent of its use, which was not limited only to the elites, but, according to literary sources, reaches other social groups, such as prostitutes. These products were manufactured from plants and minerals—such as roses, jasmine, algae, and resins, but also antimony, soot, bean flour or lead white—with techniques of varying complexity, transmitted mainly orally. Thus, possessing the ability to work with raw materials, obtain compounds that generate effects on appearance or perceived sensations and make efficient use of them becomes suspicious knowledge. For this reason, people who have these skills are frequently an object of attack or at least of suspicion.

Although later men also used these items, the practice of grooming was identified as a primarily feminine issue, often loaded with negative meanings such as excess, simulation or excessive spending. Latin texts of male authorship contrast the suspicious artificiality of personal primping with the simplicity of the absence of makeup.

Currently, the intersectional perspective allows us to appreciate how gender technologies operate by attributing women a univocal characterization beyond their class. All are suspicious of wanting to hide their defects, beautify themselves and manipulate the perception of those around them. Using elements of nature with intentions that are presumed dishonest becomes a commonplace differentially attributed to a generic identity, the feminine, which will give rise to an abundant imaginary in the Western Hemisphere, that of sorceresses/witches, capable of appearing to be what they are not, and thus obtain what they want, to the detriment of the deceived men.

Viviana Diez