When did people start wearing makeup?
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From the brains behind Brains On, this is the Moment of Um. Answering those questions that make you go, um. Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Xenon Tim Norp. Hi. Um. Um.

I am here to wish all of you Earthlings a very happy Galpiglup Day. It's a special holiday we celebrate on my home planet Calorpas. On Galpiglup Day, we celebrate our beautiful faces by covering them with purple volcanic mud paste. We gather with friends and families and smear paste on each other's faces with much laughter and shouting, ha, ha, ha.

Once the paste has dried, we take turns peeling it off of one another and examining the crumbs and crud that it has removed. Lots of mud crud means that the year has been well spent, and then our faces are fresh and clean and ready to collect the next year's crud. I have heard that you humans also sometimes cover your faces with a gloop of different colors called mikup mukpap.

No, no. Make up. That's what it's called. Make. Make up? Why is it up? Why is it not down? What is it for? Is it exactly as my friend Emma was wondering? Why did humans invent makeup in the first place? Let us consult a human who knows about things.

I'm Anna Goldfield. I'm a producer at Brains On, and I'm also an archaeologist, which means that I study people in the past.

So people have worn makeup for tons of different reasons over human history, whether it's medicinal or for religious or ritual reasons, or to look nice and fashionable, trendy, or combinations of those. So the earliest, earliest evidence we have for something that you could call makeup is at least 100,000 years old.

And that is ochre, which is a red or yellow or brown naturally occurring pigment, colored stuff. And it's from a special kind of rock or clay that has a lot of iron in it, which is where that color comes from. And it's still used today by some cultures in Africa as a way to express cultural identity, but also because it protects the skin and hair from insects and sun damage. It is polycystic.

and probably likely that people were doing that as a way to cover themselves up, but then they decided they liked how it looked.

People used ochre for lots of things. It's useful stuff. It is used to make art. So we know that people were grinding up ochre because you usually find it in kind of like rocks or softer clay sometimes. But if it's a rock, you have to grind it up to get powder before you can do anything with it. And so they would use it to make art, which they put on rock walls or cave walls sometimes. And...

We know that because we found there's a couple different sites in what is now South Africa that have shells that have residue of ochre in them. So someone ground up ochre, put it in a shell, added some water or maybe a little spit and used the sort of liquidy paste to do something. And whether that was make art on a cave wall or to put on themselves...

And people have probably used natural pigments on their skin for various reasons all over the world. But for a really long time, kind of between 100,000 years ago and now, we don't have a lot of evidence for that because those materials just don't preserve very well. A lot of times it's plant stuff and things that were once alive, which don't always preserve for a really long time.

Something that you might recognize if you see ancient Egyptian art or sometimes ancient Mesopotamian art. And that's from about 5,000 years ago. But both men and women in ancient Egypt used cosmetics. And that was a lot of times it was that very dark eyeliner, the sort of smoky Cleopatra eye that is still it comes in and out of fashion.

That was also to protect from the sun. So like when athletes put those streaks of black paint under their eyes to cut the glare, it had the same effect. And we know this because of tomb paintings. We have portraits of people who are wearing this kind of makeup, but we also have the makeup. We have lots of fancy little boxes and carriers for cosmetic supplies, and a lot of them have been found in tombs. And these were like luxury cosmetics. They're very fancy. Yeah.

I think generally people want to fit in. They want to look a certain way. And I think some makeup was probably first used medicinally or as protection or maybe because people liked the way it smelled. But then I think it kind of shifted towards, I like the way this looks on that person. I think it would look good on me. And then it became more about being fashionable. So it is a human fashion to place different kinds of

And then you realize that it looked nice too. Oh!

Maybe someday I will have a chance to visit one of your Earth-making app stores and taste a mascara or feel a lipstick. And if you ever want to borrow some purple volcano mud to put on your human face parts, Xenon Chimnorb from the planet Calorpas will hook you up. ♪

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Until then.