Racked: Why makeup matters to women in prison

In 1908 guards stormed into a cell in Milan, tearing away bed sheets, flipping over mattresses, and yanking off pillowcases for a piece of contraband that had left the warden mystified for the preceding couple of weeks. The prisoner stood to the side, patiently watching her cell get turned inside out, her cheeks painted in cheerful red circles like a ballerina.

They were after her blush like it was a brick of cocaine.

No one could understand how she did it. While the compact wasn’t found during the ransack, the guards watched her closely and soon discovered her MO: The inside stitching of the prison nightgowns were made with red thread, and she would patiently pull them out one by one, soak them in water, and dab the stain onto her cheeks like rouge.

But that wasn’t the only beauty hack circling inside the walls of the penitentiary. To buff away a dull pallor, women made their own face powder by licking the whitewashed walls of their cells, chewing the lime dust to make a white paste, and delicately dabbing it onto their faces with their fingers. Another woman regularly broke the prison rules so she could be sent down to confinement, where she stole wire from a window grate to make a corset. But the question remained, from both the guards and the newspaper readers at home: Why? Why go through all that trouble if the women were separated from the public, with no regular visitors, no callers, and no one to see them but the others serving time? The same question holds today.

Read the full article on Racked.