This name may not be familiar to many friends, but you can vaguely guess that it is the same cosmetic as thrush. After all, there is a word "Dai" in this item. Speaking of this "Dai", there was a related description in the Songs of Chu, "white and black, Shi Fangze is just". It can be seen that women's cosmetics in the Warring States period had tools to modify their eyebrows, and it can also be seen that women in ancient China were different from the West in their concept of makeup. Western classical culture was deeply influenced by ancient Egypt, so it paid more attention to eye makeup, but in the makeup of ancient women in China, it didn't pay much attention to eye makeup. So what is this "Dai"?
In the Song Dynasty, "Taiping Magnolia" mentioned that "dyeing bluestone is a classic." It can be seen that "Dai" is actually a kind of stone, a kind of ore, which women use to thrush. But friends may still not understand what Dai's is. In the history of the Qing dynasty, there are very clear historical records. "Graphite is produced in Guangdong, and women take thrush, which is called thrush stone." Therefore, the original "Blackstone" is "graphite". But graphite itself is insoluble in water, so why not just put a piece of graphite on your face? Of course not.
Wise ancient women would first grind graphite into powder, and then add glue to make a black block. When it needs to be used, put the block in a special inkstone for grinding, and finally add water for debugging. Dip this dark liquid with a brush and apply it to Yumei. This kind of black ink made of ore is one of the ancient women's articles, as well as "bronze black ink" made of azurite, "indigo black" extracted from plants, and "yellow black ink" made of pine pollen later. However, among these numerous eyebrow dais, the most precious one is the "snail dais" mentioned at the beginning of the article. This precious eyebrow wear may have existed at the end of the Han Dynasty, but the real record is in the records of the Sui Dynasty. "Snails wear Persia, and each one is ten gold." The book also said that later, because of the shortage of screw wear, copper wear could only be used instead.
It can be seen that such expensive eyebrows can't even be bought by people in the palace.
However, Emperor Yang Di, an old color group, especially liked women's eyebrow makeup. Here, no matter how heavy the tax is, ordinary people can eat it. Since I can afford to increase taxes, I will levy extremely heavy taxes, and then import a large number of this snail Dai from Persia and give it to the female thrush in the palace.
In such an atmosphere, "snail wear" has become a luxury, and "snail wear" and "snail" have become the laudatory name of eyebrows. For example, in the poem Ruan Langgui written by Ouyang Xiu, a writer in the Song Dynasty, there is a saying that "a green snail thrusts a deep eyebrow", which describes a woman's eyebrows as very beautiful.
But why is this eyebrow makeup so expensive? Is it made of gold?
According to Li Shizhen, he thinks her mother-in-law is the indigo naturalis of Persia, that is, the eyebrows made of plant dyes by Persians. If it was only plant dyes, it wouldn't be so expensive. Were there too many tariffs for the emperor in those days?
Baidu Encyclopedia said that "Spirillum" is a dye extracted from ore, which leads to high price, but Baidu Encyclopedia did not mention it.
However, if you take it literally, it is easy to think that this eyebrow is extracted from the organism "snail". In the ancient Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, there was actually such a practice of extracting dyes from bone snails. The submandibular gland of this kind of bone snail secretes a kind of mucus with bright color and good fixation. It is purple-blue when extracted, and it will turn into indigo after drying in the sun for a few minutes.
On the ancient Mediterranean coast, there is a more precious bone snail. According to the analysis of Yoshioka Yukio, a Japanese dyeing master, he thinks that this expensive bone snail extract needs to consume 2000 bone snails for each extraction of 1g dye.
It can be seen that only this complicated eyebrow can "make a ten gold". Only this extremely expensive eyebrow wear will make Hua Fei compete.