Beauty Before Anyone Taught Us About Beauty
Scarlett Column No. 004 | 3 min read
Long before tutorials, ingredient lists and ten-step routines, many of our first beauty lessons came from watching other women.
Before anyone formally taught us about beauty, many of us had already been studying it for years. We watched from bathroom doors and bedroom floors while our mothers got ready. We knew which jar belonged on the face and which enormous tub was for everybody's body. We watched cream disappear into elbows and knees, hair being parted and carefully tended with pomade or shea butter, powder pressed onto a face before church, perfume applied just before leaving the house. There were things on dressing tables we were absolutely not supposed to touch, which naturally made them the most fascinating things in the room. And we would touch them when no one was watching.
Nobody called these lessons. Nobody sat us down with a notebook and explained the correct order for getting ready. We simply watched, asked questions, copied what looked interesting and occasionally got caught with our fingers in something expensive. By the time many girls owned their first proper collection of beauty products, they already had opinions about what smelled good, what belonged in a bathroom, what a woman did after bathing and what constituted looking after yourself. Much of that knowledge was acquired quietly, woman to woman.
Before beauty came with instructions
Today, the entire internet is awash with constant beauty tips, tricks, suggestions and explanations. We can turn over a bottle and find an ingredient list, search an unfamiliar ingredient before reaching the checkout, watch a dermatologist explain why two products should never be used together and find several hundred people arguing about the correct way to wash a face. We know about ceramides, retinoids, peptides and the importance of sunscreen in a way many of our mothers simply did not. This is progress. There is plenty of old beauty advice that deserves to remain firmly in the past, along with some alarmingly enthusiastic approaches to scrubbing the face.
Still, there was knowledge in our mothers' and aunts' bathrooms. The women before us may not always have known why something worked, but they often knew their own bodies remarkably well. They knew when their skin needed more cream. They understood that cracked heels required attention before they became impossible. They knew that hair could not simply be abandoned between appointments. They knew the difference between washing quickly and bathing properly. They had favourite soaps, oils, powders and creams, and often remained loyal to them for years because experience had already done the testing.
Some of those habits survive in us without our remembering where they came from. Perhaps you cannot sleep comfortably unless your face has been washed. Perhaps you automatically reach for cream while your skin is still damp after a shower. Maybe you keep a small bottle of perfume in your handbag because a woman you grew up around never left home without smelling good. Or you have found yourself saying something to a younger woman and realised, halfway through the sentence, that you sound exactly like your mother.
That is how beauty knowledge travels more often than we acknowledge. Not only through experts, laboratories, marketing teams, magazines or increasingly clever algorithms, but through bathrooms, bedrooms, salons and conversations between women.
The things worth keeping
Of course, inheritance deserves discernment. Not everything passed between generations was useful, and familiarity does not turn bad advice into good advice. We know more about skin now. We understand sun damage differently. Formulations have improved. Some ingredients and practices that were once accepted without question deserve to be questioned.
But perhaps we don't have to choose between what women knew then and what we know now. There is something valuable about combining the two: the precision of modern beauty knowledge with the attentiveness many women learned simply by watching someone care for herself. Knowing what an ingredient does is useful. Knowing your own skin well enough to notice when it is unhappy is useful too. Understanding formulation matters, but so does understanding that beauty is not only a collection of problems waiting to be corrected.
Perhaps that is the lesson that has survived most beautifully. For many of us, our earliest encounter with beauty wasn't a transformation photograph or a promise to look younger. It was simply watching a woman take a little time over herself. She bathed. She creamed her skin. She styled or plaited her hair. She chose her earrings. She sprayed her perfume. Then she went about her life.
Years later, we find ourselves standing at our own mirrors doing some of the same things, sometimes with completely different products and far more information. And every so often, our hands move in a way that feels strangely familiar. We have been watching longer than we realised.
What is one beauty habit you picked up from your mother, grandmother, sister, auntie or another woman in your life?
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