You may have noticed people out and about with little stickers on their faces. Perhaps you've seen moons, stars, clouds or even smiley faces adorning people's cheeks and chins. Maybe you wear them yourself. While some people do wear them as accessories, these colourful stickers are medicated "pimple patches", designed to treat spots or acne.
Author
- Sara Read
Lecturer in English, Loughborough University
Some of the patches simply contain a gel formula, which keeps the emerging blemish moist to aid healing. Some wearers opt for near-transparent film patches to get the benefit in a more inconspicuous way.
Far from a new fad, beauty patches have a long history. The trend first took off in 17th-century Europe, with patches made from paper, silk or velvet, or even fine leather, cut into lozenge shapes, stars or crescent moons.
They could be made in many colours, but black was generally preferred as it made a stark contrast to the idealised pale face of western upper-class men and women, who saw this complexion as a status symbol , showing they did not go outdoors to work. The play Blurt, Master-Constable from 1602 explains another appeal of the patches - when well applied, they could "draw men's eyes to shoot glances at you".
Mentions of patches occur regularly in print from the late 16th and early 17th century. Just like today, beauty patches had a dual function. In his 1601 play Jack Drum's Entertainment , John Marston explains that: "Black patches are worn, some for pride, some to stay the rheum, and some to hide the scab."
So, some were worn by people wanting to make themselves seem more attractive, and some - sometimes medicated - were used to dry up sores. Some patches were used to conceal blemishes like the scars left by diseases such as smallpox or even syphilis.
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This latter use was the reason moralists took issue with patches. One anonymous book from 1665 claimed a chaplain of King Charles I had given a sermon comparing beauty patches to the biblical mark of Cain . It is reported that he went so far as to suggest that wearing these accessories invited plague epidemics: "black-patches and beauty-spots … were Forerunners of other Spots, and Marks of the Plague".
Other moralists focused on how, just like makeup, their job was to conceal and present a false front, which could trick admirers. This was a criticism that took on more weight into the 18th century, when people linked the use of patches to sexual promiscuity.
A Harlot's Progress by William Hogarth (1731) is a series of images depicting the fall of a country girl, Moll Hackabout. Newly arrived in London, she is tricked by the real life brothelkeeper Elizabeth Needham. Needham's face is covered with black patches.
Civil servant Samuel Pepys makes over a dozen mentions of these patches in his diary between 1660 and 1669. He first encountered "two very pretty ladies, very fashionable and with black patches, who very merrily sang all the way" on a business trip to the Hague in spring 1660.
The next day on a stroll through town, he noted how: "Everybody of fashion speaks French or Latin, or both. The women many of them very pretty and in good habits, fashionable and black spots."
He noted that patches were often moistened with spit to hold them on. In May 1668, he recalled seeing Lady Castlemayne - mistress to Charles II - demanding a patch from the face of her maid, wetting it in her mouth and applying it to the side of her own face. We know from Pepys that James, Duke of York also favoured a patch or two.
By August that same year, Pepys noted in a diary entry that his wife Elisabeth was sporting black patches to a christening. Yet he seemed to have forgotten this when he noted in November that: "My wife seemed very pretty to-day, it being the first time I had given her leave to wear a black patch." He sported a patch himself in September 1664 when he woke with a scabby mouth.
The fashion for wearing patches rose higher in the Restoration era (1660-1700), when returning royalist exiles from the Commonwealth brought home French fashions that they considered the height of sophistication.
English writer Mary Evelyn explained that mouches was the fashionable French name for "Flies, or, Black Patches", since patches were called "flies" in French and sometimes in English too. Evelyn's poem The Ladies Dressing-Room Unlock'd , published posthumously in 1690, was a biting satire on the Francophile fashions of Restoration London that Evelyn thought only the vulgar would indulge in.
While it is hard to see how people wearing spot patches nowadays might be subject to the same sorts of moralising backlash seen in the past, there are corners of the internet that mock people for going out in public with visible spot patches.
Whether they work or not, pimple patches are a harmless accessory. From the late 17th century, books begin to refer to patch boxes, ornate little containers specifically designed to hold patches.
Fashionable types came to like to be seen carrying a little silver box especially designed to hold their velvet or silk patches. Perhaps this will be the next development in the modern pimple patch craze.
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Sara Read does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
