Baudin's paste. The step from powder to grease is generally credited to Carl Baudin of the Leipzig State Theatre, who mixed a flesh-coloured paste of zinc, ochre and lard — reportedly to hide the join between his wig and his forehead. It is the same three-part logic as the formula above: opaque white mineral, earth pigment, fatty carrier.

Leichner, 1873. Ludwig Leichner was an opera singer with a chemistry background who set up a makeup business in Berlin in 1873 and produced the first commercially available greasepaint made for the stage. Its advantage over the old powder makeup was covering power and colour intensity, plus far more control in application. The firm collected exhibition medals from the Berlin trade exhibition of 1879 onward, and Leichner numbers became the standard shade language of European theatre.

The poison it replaced. Before zinc oxide, the white that did this job was ceruse — lead carbonate. It was used cosmetically for centuries and it is a cumulative poison: it damages skin, and chronic exposure attacks the nervous system. Mercury compounds were used as well. The move to zinc oxide is one of the clearest cases in cosmetic history of a pigment being replaced for toxicity rather than for looks, and it is why this blueprint is not age-gated while a lead-white version of it could never be published here at all.

Then the lights changed again. Early film stock was insensitive to red and hypersensitive to blue, so stage greasepaint photographed as a mask of the wrong tones, and film demanded its own formulations. Every later shift — panchromatic stock, colour film, television, LED stage lighting — moved the target again. The base chemistry has barely changed since 1930; what changes is the light the paint has to survive.

Make-Up

Blueprints (1)

Stage Greasepaint