Watch 5,000 Years Of Makeup In Six Minutes

Sometimes I wonder if I would've paid more attention in school if all of my classes somehow incorporated fashion and beauty into each lesson. If you were never a big history buff, but enjoy all things beauty-related, you'll probably enjoy this new video by makeup artist and vlogger, Lisa Eldridge. In this example, Eldridge kicks the typical "history of makeup" video up a notch, talking about the beauty trends from the last 5,000 years.

The video begins with, you guessed it, the ancient Egyptians, who everyone knows were big fans of winged eyeliner, as men and women often sported kohl around their eyes. She talks about how the ancient Greeks were big fans of the unibrow, often drawing it on (which is so drastically different from today's brow trends). With each beauty look, Eldridge provides a bit of a history lesson as to why that particular makeup became popular at the time.

Eldridge skipped a fairly large chunk of time between the ancient Greeks and the Middle Ages, but I won't hold it against her. From the natural makeup of the Middle Ages, she goes on to show off the pale skin and rouged cheeks of the Renaissance and then the French court, where Marie Antoinette reigned supreme. If there's anything you can take away from this video, it's that the transition from dramatic makeup to natural makeup and vice versa is often cyclical.

In between the drama of the French Revolution and the Jazz Age, we have a time of relatively minimal makeup, since Queen Victoria basically declared makeup to be trashy. However, once the women's rights movement took hold and flappers gained popularity, makeup took its place as a way to express oneself, rather than a way to differentiate socioeconomic classes, and it has pretty much stayed that way ever since.

While 5,000 years of makeup looks is a lot of material to cover in only six and a half minutes, I think Eldridge could have thrown in a few more looks, but maybe I'm just greedy because I think the history of makeup is fascinating and Eldridge does a good job of explaining the looks and actually applying them.

Images: Lisa Eldridge/YouTube (3)