Flowers were far more than decorative plants in the Middle Ages—they were essential ingredients in skincare, haircare, perfumes and even toothpaste. Medieval medical and cosmetic texts reveal how roses, violets, lilies and other flowers were used in beauty treatments designed to cleanse the skin, colour the complexion and perfume the body.
By Lorris Chevalier
Flowers occupied an important place in medieval conceptions of health, beauty and bodily care. Far from being valued solely for their decorative qualities, they were widely used in medical, cosmetic and hygienic preparations. Medieval treatises on medicine and beauty regularly mention floral ingredients, particularly roses, violets and lilies, in remedies designed to heal wounds, soothe the body, perfume the skin or improve the complexion. These practices reveal the close relationship between medicine and cosmetics in medieval culture, where caring for the body was understood as both a therapeutic and aesthetic endeavour.
Texts such as the Trotula, Guy de Chauliac’s Great Surgery, and the writings of Aldebrandin of Siena illustrate how flowers were incorporated into a wide range of preparations, including ointments, syrups, oils, floral waters and powders. These remedies were intended not only to treat illnesses but also to maintain youthful skin, enhance the complexion, care for the hair and perfume the body. The use of floral substances also reflects broader medieval ideals of beauty, such as a clear, pale complexion and well-kept, fragrant hair, which were pursued through both natural remedies and more artificial cosmetic techniques.
Flower for Skincare
British Library MS Harley 4431 fol. 221r
Among flowers, roses and violets gave rise to the greatest number of preparations: rose sugar, rose honey, rose syrup, Mesue’s rose ointment (an anti-inflammatory also used for war wounds), rose electuary, rose vinegar, and of course rose and violet oils, which were considered cooling. According to Pierre Lieutaghi, rose honey, or rose sugar, was once a valued remedy against “weaknesses of the heart and intestines”; rose sugar was still prescribed for phthisis at the beginning of the twentieth century, and rose water, initially a decoction-maceration of petals in water and later the distillate of that preparation, was regarded in the Middle Ages as a cordial of great value.
As for the violet, it entered into preparations similar to those derived from the red rose: violet sugar, syrup, honey and oil were believed to possess various virtues, softening and cooling in nature. The violet was considered a flower beneficial for the chest, and from the fifteenth century onwards its root was also noted for its purgative and emetic effects.
What concerns us here in particular is that certain flowers were included in numerous recipes intended to maintain a fair complexion, such as rose water, iris juice, or powdered lily root. Transformed into ointments, decoctions or oils, they were applied to the skin by rubbing, poultice or fumigation in order to cleanse, purify and soften it. Rose water in particular, distilled by the Arabs from the tenth century onwards, became the toilet water par excellence for the skin.
The Salernitan Trotula thus provided the following recipe for an even complexion, more specifically to combat freckles:
For freckles which by chance appear on the face, take a root of serpentary and reduce it to powder; take cuttlefish bone and frankincense. Make a powder of all these ingredients and mix it with a little water. Then smear your hand with this preparation and rub the face in the morning with rose water or bran water. Alternatively rub it with a piece of bread until the freckles disappear.
Aldebrandin of Siena, for his part, was not sparing with advice about the complexion in his chapter “How the face should be cared for.” Three of his recipes are cited here, all making use of flowers, transformed either into water or powder.
One recipe recommends washing the face with a preparation made from bean flour, lily root, madder and fish glue, reduced to powder and mixed with water so that it becomes like an ointment. The mixture is applied to the face in the evening and washed off in the morning with warm water.
Bodleian Library MS. Douce 62 fol. 7r
Another preparation intended to make the skin of the face delicate and white, and to remove all impurities, calls for water made from bean flowers in the manner of rose water, with which one washes the face and neck. For a stronger whitening effect, additional ingredients such as borage, sarcocolla, white marble, white coral, crystal, bean flour, gypsum and gum tragacanth are powdered, mixed with the water, formed into small pellets and dried in the shade. When required, one pellet is dissolved in rose water or bean-flower water and applied to the face.
A similar method recommends waters made from the flowers or leaves of bryony, or from the flowers of noele, used to wash the neck and face; such waters were said to remove freckles, spots and impurities from the skin.
Floral waters therefore served the care of the skin, which did not stop at evening out the complexion: people also attempted to combat wrinkles, as shown again by the Trotula:
For rather old wrinkles, take a gladiolus and extract its juice. With this juice cleanse the face. In the morning the skin will swell and split. We then clean the fissure with the prescribed ointment, to which we add a peeled lily root. After application the fissure will appear softer and finer.
If the ideal of a perfectly white complexion remained unattainable through treatments alone, one could resort to more or less deceptive and sometimes dangerous methods. Various flours were used to make white cosmetics, as shown in a passage from Guy de Chauliac’s Great Surgery (1363):
From the flour of peeled beans, chickpeas, vetch, barley, wheat, starch, rice and the like, from which Rhazes, Haly Abbas, Avicenna and Azaram were accustomed to make such cosmetics.
The principle is obvious: all the ingredients in the mixture are white, and “whiter white” was supposed to make a ruddy complexion appear whiter as well. Skin whitening could also be achieved with toxic products such as white lead, obtained by corroding lead in vinegar for several months. Many voices in the Middle Ages, both physicians and moralists, warned against its dangers, yet its use persisted among fashionable women.
Conversely, certain beauty tricks were used to add colour to a face that lacked it. Vegetable ingredients were used in these colour enhancers, but not exclusively: the red used to emphasise the cheeks or lips could come from dye plants such as madder or alkanet, but also from minerals such as red ochre, rich in iron oxide.
Flowers for Hair Care
British Library MS Additional 10293 fol. 266r
Hair care was essential for both men and women. Hair was expected to be abundant, hence the many recipes against hair loss or to encourage regrowth, but also well kept: free of ringworm or dandruff, shiny and even fragrant. Texts therefore recommended something akin to a shampoo, called “lessive” (a lye wash). This basic preparation was made from water and ashes, to which other ingredients could be added for treatment or fragrance. The Trotula, for instance, explains:
First she washes the hair with this lye: ashes of burned vine, stalks of barley straw and pork fat, so that the hair shines better.
In the following century the physician Aldebrandin of Siena also recommended a shampoo made from plum-tree bark and leaves, as well as a treatment mixing orpiment (arsenic sulphide) with olive oil to thicken and curl the hair.
Hair colour was likewise a major concern in cosmetic advice: authors often expressed both a fear of white hair and a preference for blond or reddish hair. The hair was first prepared to receive dye, usually with a lye containing alum, after which the colouring mixture was applied. Authors were aware that some preparations smelled unpleasant; Guy de Chauliac, for example, citing Avicenna’s recipe for hair dye from the Canon of Medicine, recommended adding aromatic powders to correct the odour, a suggestion already made by Henri de Mondeville.
To obtain blond hair, Mondeville recommended several plants, particularly yellow flowers such as broom blossoms. For reddish hair, Guy de Chauliac describes a recipe using ashes and vine shoots with crushed lupins, myrrh and alkanet (brazilwood), with which the hair was washed repeatedly until it turned red. He also notes regional variations: women of Montpellier added stoechas and broom flowers to the lye; those of Bologna used boxwood scrapings and lemon peel; Parisian women used gentian root, barberry root and safflower flowers.
Recipes for turning hair black were also plentiful. In the first century Dioscorides recommended “cypress leaves with vinegar” or “gall nuts soaked in vinegar and water and applied.” In the thirteenth century Aldebrandin likewise advised using acacia and walnut husks mixed with sour wine and applied to the head.
Finally, flowers and other substances could also be used simply to perfume the hair. Henri de Mondeville suggested scenting it with musk, cloves, nutmeg, cardamom, galangal and similar substances. Smell or at least the absence of unpleasant odour was in fact an important element of sociability. Numerous recipes were designed to prevent perspiration or to perfume hair and breath. Literary works echo this concern: in the 13th-century work Chastoiement des dames by Robert de Blois, a treatise on the education of girls, women were advised to eat anise, fennel and cumin at breakfast to freshen the breath.
The odour of the mouth and even of the nostrils was to be carefully controlled in order to ensure pleasant social relations, and even to favour seduction and erotic appeal. Mondeville remarks, for instance, that some people added camphor to ointments, a practice he disapproved of because its smell diminished sexual desire.
Flowers in Toothpaste
For many authors, preserving healthy teeth required regular ablutions with suitable preparations, above all the dentifrice, literally the rubbing of the teeth. The Bolognese physician Taddeo Alderotti (d. c. 1295), for example, devoted considerable attention to tooth powders and mouthwashes in his Consilia, which included no fewer than fifty cosmetic preparations. One of them, a mouthwash “for the teeth and gums,” combined pomegranate bark, roses, olive leaves, savory and pyrethrum, boiled in white wine and used for rinsing the mouth over eight consecutive days.
Dr Lorris Chevalier, who has a Ph.D. in medieval literature, is a historical advisor for movies, including The Last Duel and Napoleon. Click here to view his website.
Flowers were far more than decorative plants in the Middle Ages—they were essential ingredients in skincare, haircare, perfumes and even toothpaste. Medieval medical and cosmetic texts reveal how roses, violets, lilies and other flowers were used in beauty treatments designed to cleanse the skin, colour the complexion and perfume the body.
By Lorris Chevalier
Flowers occupied an important place in medieval conceptions of health, beauty and bodily care. Far from being valued solely for their decorative qualities, they were widely used in medical, cosmetic and hygienic preparations. Medieval treatises on medicine and beauty regularly mention floral ingredients, particularly roses, violets and lilies, in remedies designed to heal wounds, soothe the body, perfume the skin or improve the complexion. These practices reveal the close relationship between medicine and cosmetics in medieval culture, where caring for the body was understood as both a therapeutic and aesthetic endeavour.
Texts such as the Trotula, Guy de Chauliac’s Great Surgery, and the writings of Aldebrandin of Siena illustrate how flowers were incorporated into a wide range of preparations, including ointments, syrups, oils, floral waters and powders. These remedies were intended not only to treat illnesses but also to maintain youthful skin, enhance the complexion, care for the hair and perfume the body. The use of floral substances also reflects broader medieval ideals of beauty, such as a clear, pale complexion and well-kept, fragrant hair, which were pursued through both natural remedies and more artificial cosmetic techniques.
Flower for Skincare
Among flowers, roses and violets gave rise to the greatest number of preparations: rose sugar, rose honey, rose syrup, Mesue’s rose ointment (an anti-inflammatory also used for war wounds), rose electuary, rose vinegar, and of course rose and violet oils, which were considered cooling. According to Pierre Lieutaghi, rose honey, or rose sugar, was once a valued remedy against “weaknesses of the heart and intestines”; rose sugar was still prescribed for phthisis at the beginning of the twentieth century, and rose water, initially a decoction-maceration of petals in water and later the distillate of that preparation, was regarded in the Middle Ages as a cordial of great value.
As for the violet, it entered into preparations similar to those derived from the red rose: violet sugar, syrup, honey and oil were believed to possess various virtues, softening and cooling in nature. The violet was considered a flower beneficial for the chest, and from the fifteenth century onwards its root was also noted for its purgative and emetic effects.
What concerns us here in particular is that certain flowers were included in numerous recipes intended to maintain a fair complexion, such as rose water, iris juice, or powdered lily root. Transformed into ointments, decoctions or oils, they were applied to the skin by rubbing, poultice or fumigation in order to cleanse, purify and soften it. Rose water in particular, distilled by the Arabs from the tenth century onwards, became the toilet water par excellence for the skin.
The Salernitan Trotula thus provided the following recipe for an even complexion, more specifically to combat freckles:
For freckles which by chance appear on the face, take a root of serpentary and reduce it to powder; take cuttlefish bone and frankincense. Make a powder of all these ingredients and mix it with a little water. Then smear your hand with this preparation and rub the face in the morning with rose water or bran water. Alternatively rub it with a piece of bread until the freckles disappear.
Aldebrandin of Siena, for his part, was not sparing with advice about the complexion in his chapter “How the face should be cared for.” Three of his recipes are cited here, all making use of flowers, transformed either into water or powder.
One recipe recommends washing the face with a preparation made from bean flour, lily root, madder and fish glue, reduced to powder and mixed with water so that it becomes like an ointment. The mixture is applied to the face in the evening and washed off in the morning with warm water.
Another preparation intended to make the skin of the face delicate and white, and to remove all impurities, calls for water made from bean flowers in the manner of rose water, with which one washes the face and neck. For a stronger whitening effect, additional ingredients such as borage, sarcocolla, white marble, white coral, crystal, bean flour, gypsum and gum tragacanth are powdered, mixed with the water, formed into small pellets and dried in the shade. When required, one pellet is dissolved in rose water or bean-flower water and applied to the face.
A similar method recommends waters made from the flowers or leaves of bryony, or from the flowers of noele, used to wash the neck and face; such waters were said to remove freckles, spots and impurities from the skin.
Floral waters therefore served the care of the skin, which did not stop at evening out the complexion: people also attempted to combat wrinkles, as shown again by the Trotula:
For rather old wrinkles, take a gladiolus and extract its juice. With this juice cleanse the face. In the morning the skin will swell and split. We then clean the fissure with the prescribed ointment, to which we add a peeled lily root. After application the fissure will appear softer and finer.
If the ideal of a perfectly white complexion remained unattainable through treatments alone, one could resort to more or less deceptive and sometimes dangerous methods. Various flours were used to make white cosmetics, as shown in a passage from Guy de Chauliac’s Great Surgery (1363):
From the flour of peeled beans, chickpeas, vetch, barley, wheat, starch, rice and the like, from which Rhazes, Haly Abbas, Avicenna and Azaram were accustomed to make such cosmetics.
The principle is obvious: all the ingredients in the mixture are white, and “whiter white” was supposed to make a ruddy complexion appear whiter as well. Skin whitening could also be achieved with toxic products such as white lead, obtained by corroding lead in vinegar for several months. Many voices in the Middle Ages, both physicians and moralists, warned against its dangers, yet its use persisted among fashionable women.
Conversely, certain beauty tricks were used to add colour to a face that lacked it. Vegetable ingredients were used in these colour enhancers, but not exclusively: the red used to emphasise the cheeks or lips could come from dye plants such as madder or alkanet, but also from minerals such as red ochre, rich in iron oxide.
Flowers for Hair Care
Hair care was essential for both men and women. Hair was expected to be abundant, hence the many recipes against hair loss or to encourage regrowth, but also well kept: free of ringworm or dandruff, shiny and even fragrant. Texts therefore recommended something akin to a shampoo, called “lessive” (a lye wash). This basic preparation was made from water and ashes, to which other ingredients could be added for treatment or fragrance. The Trotula, for instance, explains:
First she washes the hair with this lye: ashes of burned vine, stalks of barley straw and pork fat, so that the hair shines better.
In the following century the physician Aldebrandin of Siena also recommended a shampoo made from plum-tree bark and leaves, as well as a treatment mixing orpiment (arsenic sulphide) with olive oil to thicken and curl the hair.
Hair colour was likewise a major concern in cosmetic advice: authors often expressed both a fear of white hair and a preference for blond or reddish hair. The hair was first prepared to receive dye, usually with a lye containing alum, after which the colouring mixture was applied. Authors were aware that some preparations smelled unpleasant; Guy de Chauliac, for example, citing Avicenna’s recipe for hair dye from the Canon of Medicine, recommended adding aromatic powders to correct the odour, a suggestion already made by Henri de Mondeville.
To obtain blond hair, Mondeville recommended several plants, particularly yellow flowers such as broom blossoms. For reddish hair, Guy de Chauliac describes a recipe using ashes and vine shoots with crushed lupins, myrrh and alkanet (brazilwood), with which the hair was washed repeatedly until it turned red. He also notes regional variations: women of Montpellier added stoechas and broom flowers to the lye; those of Bologna used boxwood scrapings and lemon peel; Parisian women used gentian root, barberry root and safflower flowers.
Recipes for turning hair black were also plentiful. In the first century Dioscorides recommended “cypress leaves with vinegar” or “gall nuts soaked in vinegar and water and applied.” In the thirteenth century Aldebrandin likewise advised using acacia and walnut husks mixed with sour wine and applied to the head.
Finally, flowers and other substances could also be used simply to perfume the hair. Henri de Mondeville suggested scenting it with musk, cloves, nutmeg, cardamom, galangal and similar substances. Smell or at least the absence of unpleasant odour was in fact an important element of sociability. Numerous recipes were designed to prevent perspiration or to perfume hair and breath. Literary works echo this concern: in the 13th-century work Chastoiement des dames by Robert de Blois, a treatise on the education of girls, women were advised to eat anise, fennel and cumin at breakfast to freshen the breath.
The odour of the mouth and even of the nostrils was to be carefully controlled in order to ensure pleasant social relations, and even to favour seduction and erotic appeal. Mondeville remarks, for instance, that some people added camphor to ointments, a practice he disapproved of because its smell diminished sexual desire.
Flowers in Toothpaste
For many authors, preserving healthy teeth required regular ablutions with suitable preparations, above all the dentifrice, literally the rubbing of the teeth. The Bolognese physician Taddeo Alderotti (d. c. 1295), for example, devoted considerable attention to tooth powders and mouthwashes in his Consilia, which included no fewer than fifty cosmetic preparations. One of them, a mouthwash “for the teeth and gums,” combined pomegranate bark, roses, olive leaves, savory and pyrethrum, boiled in white wine and used for rinsing the mouth over eight consecutive days.
Dr Lorris Chevalier, who has a Ph.D. in medieval literature, is a historical advisor for movies, including The Last Duel and Napoleon. Click here to view his website.
Click here to read more from Lorris Chevalier
Further Readings:
Moulinier-Brogi, Laurence, “Fleurs, beauté et santé dans la pharmacopée médiévale,” in Fleurs et fruits au Moyen Âge (2020).
Top Image: Bodleian Library MS. Douce 62 fol. 5r
Subscribe to Medievalverse
Related Posts