Who Invented Mascara? A History of Darkened Lashes

Of all the products crowded into a makeup bag, mascara is the one I would keep if I could keep only one. A single coat opens the eye, defines its shape and lends a face that awake, finished look nothing else quite manages. Yet the little tube with its spiral brush is a surprisingly modern invention. The desire behind it — to make the lashes darker, longer and more emphatic than nature intended — is thousands of years old, but the tools we now take for granted were pieced together across the twentieth century, one clever idea at a time. So when someone asks me who invented mascara, the honest answer is that no single person did. It was a relay, passed from ancient Egypt to Victorian London to a small kitchen in America, and finished only when a chemist finally solved the humble problem of the brush.

Ancient origins: kohl on lashes and brows

The instinct to darken the eyes reaches back at least five thousand years, and it was the Egyptians who turned it into an art. Both women and men in ancient Egypt rimmed their eyes with kohl, a dark paste most often ground from galena, a lead-based mineral, and sometimes from malachite for a greenish cast. They applied it to the waterline, the brows and the lashes with a small rod, extending the eye outward in that unmistakable almond shape we still recognise today.

This was never purely decoration. Kohl was believed to protect against the harsh desert glare and the ever-present threat of eye infection, and it carried spiritual weight too, associated with the protective eye of Horus. Function and beauty were bound together, which is exactly how I think of makeup now. If you want the fuller picture of how those first painted eyes were created, I have written about it at length in my piece on ancient Egyptian makeup. What matters here is the principle they established: darkened lashes and a defined lash line make the eye read as larger, brighter and more alluring. Every mascara since has simply been a new way of chasing that same effect.

The Greeks and Romans continued the habit, mixing soot, burnt cork and various resins to blacken the lashes, though attitudes swung between admiration and disapproval depending on the moralist of the day. For most of the centuries that followed, though, lash cosmetics were a homemade, improvised affair. There was no product you could buy, only recipes handed between women and the soot from a lamp.

The long homemade centuries

Right through the medieval and Renaissance periods, emphasising the eyes fell in and out of favour, and lashes were rarely the focus. Fashion often prized a high, bare forehead and pale, untroubled skin over a dramatic eye. When women did want darker lashes, they reached for whatever was to hand: elderberry juice, burnt cloves, lamp-black gathered from a candle, or ashes mixed with oil.

The Victorians revived a genuine appetite for enhanced lashes, even as respectable society insisted that a lady should look entirely unpainted. This tension produced some wonderfully resourceful recipes. Women heated a mixture of ash and elderberry, or applied a bead of hot wax and soot to the lashes with a pin, and some pursued longer lashes through frankly alarming methods. The idealised beauty of the era looked natural but was often quietly, carefully constructed — a theme I explore more fully in my article on Victorian beauty. The stage was set for someone to take these kitchen-table concoctions and turn them into a proper, sellable product. That someone was a perfumer in London.

Eugène Rimmel and the first commercial lash cosmetic

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Eugène Rimmel, a French-born perfumer working in London, created one of the first commercially produced cosmetics for the lashes. Rimmel ran a hugely successful perfumery and had a genius for packaging and marketing, and his lash product — based on coal dust and petroleum jelly — brought darkened lashes out of the kitchen and into the shops.

His impact is best measured by language itself. To this day the word for mascara is rimmel in French, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, Romanian and several other languages. It is a rare and lovely distinction: an entire category of cosmetic named after the man who commercialised it. When a Frenchwoman reaches for her rimmel, she is unknowingly invoking a Victorian perfumer whose shopfronts once stood in London. That, to me, is the moment lash cosmetics stopped being folklore and became an industry.

Rimmel’s formulas were still crude by modern standards, and they had a rival across the Atlantic who would give the product something Rimmel never did: a household name and a memorable origin story.

Maybelline, 1915, and a sister named Mabel

The story most people half-remember is the one about Maybelline, and happily it is largely true. Around 1915, a young American named Thomas Lyle Williams watched his sister Mabel darkening her lashes and brows with a homemade mixture of coal dust and Vaseline — the very same coal-dust-and-petroleum-jelly idea Rimmel had commercialised, only mixed at home. Struck by how much it flattered her, Williams set about turning it into a product he could sell.

He named the company after his sister, blending “Mabel” with “Vaseline” to arrive at Maybelline. The early product, launched around 1917 and often sold as Lash-Brow-Ine and then as Maybelline cake mascara, was posted out by mail order and grew into one of the most recognisable cosmetics brands in the world. I find it a genuinely charming piece of history that a global beauty empire began with one brother watching one sister at her mirror. It is also a reminder that the best ideas in makeup usually come from ordinary women solving their own problems, long before any laboratory gets involved.

Cake mascara and the wetted brush

The mascara Mabel used, and the mascara most women used well into the twentieth century, bore almost no resemblance to the tube in your bag today. It came as a hard cake, pressed into a small tin like a block of dry paint or a watercolour, and sold with a tiny separate brush.

The routine was fiddly and intimate. You dampened the brush — usually by spitting on it, if we are being honest about how it was actually done, or with a drop of water — worked it against the cake to pick up the pigment, then stroked the colour onto the lashes. It demanded patience and a steady hand, and the result could smudge at the first hint of rain or tears. Yet this was the everyday reality of eye makeup for decades, and women became genuinely skilled with it. When you look at the crisp, defined lashes of the silent-film stars and the flappers of the 1920s, you are looking at cake mascara, applied with a wet brush and a great deal of practice. The smoky, heavily fringed eyes of that era were a technical achievement as much as a fashion statement.

Helena Rubinstein and the move to the tube

The next leap was about convenience and formula, and it belongs largely to the great cosmetics pioneers, chief among them Helena Rubinstein. Through the mid-twentieth century the industry moved away from the dry cake towards mascara in a cream or lotion form, packaged in a tube and squeezed onto a brush or applied with an applicator. This was less messy, more portable and far kinder to a woman getting ready in a hurry.

Rubinstein, one of the towering figures of modern cosmetics, was central to popularising these more sophisticated, ready-to-use formulas. The move from cake to tube meant mascara could travel in a handbag, be reapplied at a restaurant and be produced at a scale that made it genuinely affordable. But even a tube of cream mascara still relied on a fairly ordinary brush, and the true revolution — the one that shaped every mascara I use professionally today — was hiding in that last, overlooked component.

The grooved wand that changed everything

Here is the detail I love most, because it is so easy to overlook. For all the advances in formula, mascara was still applied with a straight, simple brush until the middle of the twentieth century. The breakthrough came in the late 1950s when Helena Rubinstein’s “Mascara-Matic” introduced an automatic applicator built around a grooved metal rod. Instead of a paintbrush, the wand had ridges that caught and held the mascara, so that as it drew through the lashes it deposited colour evenly and combed the lashes at the same time.

This grooved, spiralled wand — the ancestor of the spoolie brush we all know — is arguably the single most important invention in the whole story. It transformed mascara from a fiddly, skill-dependent chore into something a woman could apply confidently in seconds. Coat, comb, separate, all in one stroke. Nearly every mascara sold today still uses a version of that idea: a shaped brush, bristled or moulded, that both loads the lash with product and grooms it as it goes. When people ask me who invented modern mascara, this is really the moment I point to. The formula mattered, but it was the brush that set women free.

The false-lash and waterproof era, and mascara today

With the wand solved, the second half of the twentieth century became a race to do more. The 1960s brought an obsession with enormous, spidery lashes, doubled and tripled coats, lower-lash definition and the widespread embrace of false lashes worn alongside mascara — think of the doe-eyed icons of that decade. Chemists chased ever more dramatic effects: lengthening formulas with tiny fibres, volumising formulas with heavier waxes, and curling formulas designed to lift and hold.

The other great quest was staying power. Waterproof mascara, built on water-resistant, film-forming ingredients, meant lashes could survive a summer’s day, a wedding or a good cry, though at the cost of a more determined removal at night. Today the choice is dizzying: tubing formulas that slide off in warm water, lash-serum hybrids, brushes moulded from plastic rather than bristle, and clean formulations free of the ingredients that once caused irritation. The lash line has come an extraordinarily long way from a Victorian pin dipped in wax.

What strikes me, having worked with all of it, is how little the underlying goal has changed. The Egyptian rimming her eye with kohl and the modern bride choosing between a lengthening and a volumising formula want precisely the same thing: an open, expressive, beautifully defined eye. If you enjoy tracing how one part of the face has been reinvented over the centuries, you might like my wider history of the evolution of eye makeup, or the sweeping overview in my history of makeup. The tools change; the wish behind them does not.

Mascara is the last thing I reach for on a finished eye, and applying it well — wiggling at the root, building without clumping, balancing top and bottom — is a genuine skill that rewards a little teaching. If you would like to learn to use your own lashes to their best advantage, my makeup lessons cover exactly that, and you are always welcome to get in touch to talk through what you are after.