Name: The History of Makeup || Graded Reader || Improve Your English Fluency ✅️
Uploaded: 2026-02-14T01:00:15.000Z
Duration: 14 min 8 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

Imagine you are sitting with me by a warm fire.

Outside, the world is busy and loud, but here it is quiet.

Have you ever looked in the mirror in the morning?

Maybe you put a little color on your lips.

Or maybe you just look at your reflection and wonder, who am I?

We often think of makeup as something modern.

We think of bright shops, plastic bottles, and famous people on the Internet.

But my friends, have you ever stopped to wonder, where did it all begin?

The story of makeup is not a story about vanity.

Vanity is when someone cares too much about their looks.

It is a story about our need to speak without using words.

Since the very beginning of time, humans have used color and paint to tell the world who they are.

They used it to show their power to talk to their gods and to feel safe.

But for our ancestors, it was much more than that.

Let's go far back into the mists of time.

We are going to travel through thousands of years.

We will see how a little bit of color changed the way we see ourselves.

Imagine a land of golden sand and a bright burning sun.

If you looked clean and beautiful, you were closer to the gods.

The most famous part of Egyptian makeup was coal.

They used a small stick to put it around their eyes.

Have you seen pictures of the famous Queen Cleopatra?

Her eyes are always lined with deep, dark black.

The black powder helped protect their eyes from the bright light.

It was like the first pair of sunglasses.

It also kept away tiny insects and eye infections.

So it was medicine and fashion at the same time.

Next to the Egyptians, in a place called Mesopotamia, what we now call Iraq, people were also very creative.

They were the first to use lipstick, but it wasn't in a tube like today.

They crushed beautiful semi precious stones into a fine dust.

They put this dust on their lips to make them sparkle.

To these ancient people, makeup was a bridge.

A bridge between the human world and the world of the spirits.

When they painted their faces, they felt protected, they felt powerful.

Now let's travel across the sea to ancient Greece.

The Greeks were very different from the Egyptians.

They believed that a healthy body was the most beautiful thing of all In Greece, if you used too much makeup, people might think you were being dishonest.

Women used a little bit of honey to keep their skin soft.

They used crushed berries to give their cheeks a tiny bit of red color.

Rome was a place of big buildings and big dreams.

And for the Romans, makeup was a way to show how much money you had.

Wealthy Roman women wanted skin that was as white as snow.

Because if your skin was white, it meant you did not have to work outside in the sun.

It showed you were a lady of leisure, a person who stays inside and rests.

To get this white skin, they used something called lead.

Lead is a heavy metal, and it is very poisonous.

They put white lead powder on their faces every day.

It ruined their skin and caused many health problems.

For thousands of years, humans have been willing to put dangerous things on their bodies just to follow a trend.

A trend is something that is popular for a short time.

Even in ancient Rome, people were suffering for the sake of beauty.

As the centuries passed, we entered the middle ages in Europe.

The leaders of the church said that makeup was a sin.

They believed that if you changed your face, you were lying to God.

Because of this, most women stopped wearing colorful makeup.

A pure woman was supposed to have a clean, plain face.

Beauty was seen as a danger, something that could lead people into trouble.

But then, like a flower blooming after a long winter, the renaissance arrived.