‘Turning Botches into Beauty’: The Early Modern Origins of the Pimple Patch

by Marlo Avidon (@MarloAvidon)

Today, it’s not uncommon to see someone walking down the street with a hydrocolloid patch stuck to their cheek, chin, or forehead to cover and treat a pimple. While many of these acne patches are designed to remain unseen, a scroll through the websites of popular beauty suppliers reveal a diverse range of patches in a spectrum of shapes and colours, including stars, flowers, hearts, and more. The twenty-first century reinvention of the pimple patch has turned acne into a fashionable accessory (Fig. 1). However, this is not a new development! While deliberately drawing attention to a blemish might seem like a contradiction, the trend of conspicuously covering imperfections dates back centuries. 

Recorded as early as the Roman empire, patches, known to early modern consumers as plaisters or mouches, grew in popularity in England from the seventeenth century.¹ Particularly, after the Civil War and the Restoration of Charles II, Royalist exiles returned to English soil enchanted by Continental, and especially French, styles. Traditionally black, circular and made from paper, velvet, or other fabric, the beauty patch was designed to contrast and accentuate the paleness of a woman’s skin.²A clear, pale face was widely seen as a quintessential beauty standard, and many women perceived the juxtaposition of their luminous skin and the dark patch as a way of enhancing and elevating their appearance. Those attuned to classical imagery claimed that the patch was inspired by the goddess Venus’s single imperfection that heightened her indescribable beauty.³

Throughout the seventeenth century, women began to acquire patches in greater numbers, often wearing several plaisters of varying sizes or shapes at once. Contemporary fashion plates showcasing the latest styles, such as Nicholas Arnoult’s 1687 engraving of a ‘Femme de qualité en habit D’esté’, shows the stylish model wearing patches on her forehead, cheek, and at the corner of her mouth (Fig. 2). Indeed, the patch became a staple of the women’s toilette – Lady Elizabeth Petty instructed her children to buy her ‘a payer of velvet patches, of the same pattern I sent in the [filagrane] case for your watch’.⁴ Her clear instructions highlight the variety of styles patches could be purchased in and their necessity in any fashionable woman’s wardrobe.

But beyond showcasing ideal female beauty or demonstrating knowledge of the latest cosmopolitan styles, the beauty patch, like today, was commonly used to cover blemishes on the face, such as acne or smallpox scars. the diarist Samuel Pepys, describing Charles II’s mistress Barbara Villiers on 5 May 1668, noted how she ‘called to one of her women… for a little patch off her face, and put it into her mouth and wetted it, and so clapped it upon her own by the side of her mouth, I suppose she feeling a pimple rising there.’⁵ Barbara’s use of the patch mirrors on her pimple mirror its modern equivalent, using it to turn her blemish into a into a fashionable statement. To quote R. Smith’s satirical pamphlet ‘A Wonder of Wonders’, many seventeenth-century women believed that the patch could ‘turn Botches into Beauty.’⁶ While, unlike their modern equivalent, the early modern mouche could not reduce the size of the pimples, recipe books commonly included instructions on reducing the appearance of spots of blemishes.⁷

However, moralists increasingly expressed concerns over the growing prevalence of the beauty patch. Like cosmetics, perceived by John Evelyn as ‘a most ignominious thing’ used exclusively by prostitutes, patches also became linked to sexual immorality.⁸ In particular, anxiety rose that patches, in addition to hiding pimples, could mask venereal sores or other signs of sexually transmitted illness.⁹ When coupled with discourse about the sexual indiscretions of court women and growing comparison between them and sex workers, the patch took on another, darker meaning amongst certain commentators. Disregarding these scathing critiques, women did not seem particular phased by critique of the patch. Indeed, the accessory only continued to grow in popularity and was worn by a growing number of stylish women across various social stations, available for purchase across London’s main shopping centres.

By the eighteenth-century, the mouche took on greater meaning. Their shape and placement became an unspoken language amongst aristocrats, often used by women to covertly indicate their sexual availability or political leanings. Perhaps, with time, modern adopters of the acne patch will devise a similarly clever way of communicating with them? In the meantime, the early modern popularity of the patch shows the long history of embracing one’s imperfections and the value of looking to the past to find the origins of today’s fads.

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1. Karen Hearn, ‘Revising the Visage: Patches and Beauty Spots in Seventeenth-Century British and Dutch Painted Portraits’, Huntington Library Quarterly 78 (2015), p. 814. ↩︎
2. Aileen Ribeiro, Facing Beauty: Painted Women & Cosmetic Art (London; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 133. ↩︎
3. Hearn, ‘Revising the Visage’, p. 818. ↩︎
4. Lady Petty to her children, Dublyn 1 Sept. 1684, ‘Petty Papers. vol. VIII. Personal correspondence and papers of Petty and his family; 1648-1691’, Correspondence and papers of Sir William Petty (1623-1687), Add MS 72857, BL, fols 41-42. ↩︎
5. Samuel Pepys, ‘5 May 1668’, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, accessed via https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1668/05/05/ ↩︎
6. R. Smith, A Wonder of Wonders: or, a Metamorphosis of fair Faces voluntarily transformed into foul Visages as quoted in Hearn, ‘Revising the Visage’, p. 814. ↩︎
7. See as example Thomas Jeamson, Artificiall Embellishments, Or Arts Best Directions How to Preserve Beauty Or Procure It (Oxford: Printed by William Hall, 1665). ↩︎
8. John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn Kalendarium, vol. III,  p. 97. On the relationship between cosmetics, patches, and morality see Dosia Reichardt, ‘“Their Faces Are Not Their Own”: Powders, Patches and Paint in Seventeenth-Century Poetry’ The Dalhousie Review, no. 84 (2004): 195–214. ↩︎
9. Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England (London; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 263-264. ↩︎