"The ceruse or white Lead, wherewith women use to paint themselves was, without doubt, brought in use by the divell, the capitall enemie of nature..."

"... therwith to transforme humane creatures, of fair, making them ugly, enormious and abominable... a man might easily cut off a curd or cheese-cake from either of their cheeks."

Wrote Thomas Tuke in "A treatise against Painting and Tincturing of Men and Women," in 1616.



Found on this page about make-up in Elizabethan times, which I was looking up in an effort to gain insight into some lines of Shakespearean sonnet that someone quoted the other day:

When forty winters have besieged thy brow
And dug deep trenches in thy beauty's field...

That was quoted a propos of a discussion I started about the use of the word "winters" in place of "years," which I'd seen reading "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle." I was reading that because I was reading about the "Harrying of the North," because I was researching the origin of the term (and tactic) "scorched earth," which I got to  wondering about only because an entomologist named Schorsch read (and commented on) my post "Flesh! and calenture," to respond to my question whether insects have flesh, which came up as a consequence of another commenter pointing out a health-and-virtue food product made from "cricket flesh" on a post about the history of Velveeta, which I'd only noticed because I was reading about some Japanese scientists visualizing cultivating human organs inside the living bodies of pigs. 

Where have your idle thoughts taken you lately and in winters past?