Stage Greasepaint

Weigh out a documented white base: 75 g zinc oxide, 5 g kaolin, 20 g precipitated chalk — 750 : 50 : 200 in parts per thousand. Zinc oxide gives the opacity, kaolin the slip, chalk the body.

Grind the three powders together in a mortar and pass them through a fine sieve. Any grit survives into the finished stick and drags across the skin.

Zinc oxide, kaolin and chalk are not toxic on skin, but no fine mineral dust belongs in your lungs. Weigh and grind in still air with a mask on.

Weigh 40 g cocoa butter, 3 g beeswax and 7 g ceresine — the 80 : 6 : 14 base recorded for greasepaint sticks in the 1930 trade literature.

Melt the three waxes together over water, stirring until clear. Direct heat scorches cocoa butter and the smell stays in the product.

Chill a drop on a cold spoon, then warm it and read the temperature at which it goes liquid. It must be above blood temperature. A base that melts below 37 °C turns greasy on the face and has to be powdered constantly to stay put.

Too soft, add a gram of beeswax or ceresine; too hard and it will not spread. Beeswax also gives the tack that lets setting powder cling — up to about a tenth of the base is the working guidance.

Add the powder blend to the molten wax a little at a time, stirring hard. Roughly equal weights of powder and base gives a paint stick; more base gives a sheer one.

For the shade recorded as No. 6 yellowish flesh, tint 88 parts white base with 10.8 parts yellow ochre and 1.2 parts Armenian bole. Weigh the pigments; judging by eye in a hot melt is unreliable, because it dries lighter than it looks.

Work the warm paste on a slab with a spatula or muller until no streaks of pigment remain. Milling, not stirring, is what disperses the colour evenly.

Pour the paste into paper tubes or a silicone mould and tap out the air. Let them set at room temperature — a fridge sets them fast and cracks the core.

Draw a stripe on the back of your hand and look at it under the brightest light you have. This is the test the product exists for: it has to still read as modelled colour under stage lighting, not vanish.

Test on the inside of the forearm and leave it 24 hours before going near a face. Homemade cosmetics are not sterile and pigments differ between suppliers.

Dust the applied paint with a translucent powder to kill the shine. Remove it with oil or cold cream, never soap — the base is a wax, and water simply moves it around.

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.