Tutankhamun's beauty secrets

Times Online

The glamour of the ancient Egyptians is a major element of our eternal fascination with them. Entranced as we may be by the politics of Tutankhamun’s reign, it is the jet wigs and almond eyes that get us every time. For Alexander McQueen’s autumn/winter 08 catwalk collection, make-up artist Charlotte Tilbury paid homage to Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, using colours since released as the limited-edition line MAC for McQueen. So successful a look was it for Taylor that it took her some years to renounce it; a pastiche Egyptian rigout is still the favoured choice of girls at fancy-dress parties. Not only do we wish to walk like an Egyptian, we enjoy daubing our faces like one, too.

And yet, as Silverman cautions, it is hard to know precisely what ancient Egyptian maquillage looked like. For a start, much of the evidence originates among funerary artefacts designed to portray not the real world, but an idealised afterlife in which mortals took on extravagant immortal form. For another, the portraiture of the period is often symbolic and mannerist rather than realistic.