Renaissance Beauty: hair, makeup and skincare in the 16th century

You're Dead to Me

BBC

Comedy, History

4.7 • 10.9K Ratings

🗓️ 5 September 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Greg Jenner is joined in sixteenth-century Italy by historian Professor Jill Burke and comedian Tatty Macleod to learn all about Renaissance beauty standards and treatments. Early modern Italy is renowned for the gorgeous artworks created by painters like Titian, Rubens and Botticelli, many of them featuring beautiful women looking at themselves in mirrors or getting made up for a night out. In this episode, we take you through a Renaissance Get Ready With Me as we explore how these women would have been taking care of their hair and skin. We look at what hairstyles and makeup men and women wore, how often they bathed, whether or not they removed their body hair, and how they shaped their bodies through dieting and underwear. Along the way, we dive into the recipes for popular cosmetics and skincare treatments, ask where Renaissance beauty standards came from, and uncover the sexist, racist and classist ideas that often underpinned them. But we also explore how their beauty routines could be an avenue for women’s self-expression, and show the importance of the history of beauty, even amidst the turbulent politics and warfare of the early modern period.

If you’re a fan of women’s creativity through time, whacky historical recipes and early modern Italian art, you’ll love our episode on Renaissance beauty.

If you want to know more about the beauty standards of the past, why not listen to our episode on the history of high heels, or haircare entrepreneur Madam CJ Walker. And for more from Renaissance Italy, check out our episodes on the Borgias and Leonardo Da Vinci.

You’re Dead To Me is the comedy podcast that takes history seriously. Every episode, Greg Jenner brings together the best names in history and comedy to learn and laugh about the past.

Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Emma Bentley Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Gill Huggett Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: Philip Sellars

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism.
0:09.0	In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero?
0:16.0	Simply doing your job, being a decent human being.
0:20.0	A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by
0:23.1	their own light and that light is to be recognised by others. The long history of heroism with me,
0:28.6	Rory Stewart. Listen on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Greg here.
0:38.1	Just a reminder, before we get going,
0:39.8	that episodes of Your Dead to Me are released on Fridays
0:42.1	wherever you get your podcasts.
0:44.0	But if you're in the UK,
0:45.6	you can listen to the latest episodes 28 days earlier than anywhere else.
0:50.2	First, on BBC Sounds.
0:53.3	Hello, and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously.
0:58.6	My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster.
1:02.0	And today we are plucking our brows and caking our faces with lead as we learn all about the history of beauty in Renaissance Italy.
1:09.3	And to help us with our makeover,
1:12.2	we have two very special visitors that you're dead to me salon.
1:13.9	In History Corner,
1:15.1	she's Professor of Renaissance Visual and Material Cultures
1:17.7	at the University of Edinburgh,
1:19.0	where her research focuses on how human bodies
1:21.1	were thought about and modified during the Renaissance.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.