It should be obvious to anyone why milk is good for the skin, so I won’t go into it (but it’s because it’s a cream). The lemon juice works as an exfoliant and the spirits of wine, combined with everything else, creates butter milk with grain alcohol in it. I guess that makes the buttermilk maybe a bit flammable—because when you mix grain alcohol with sugar and acid, you basically get fuel.
Tag: Pastes
Maloine
I don’t know about you, but I get excited when I discover an unpublished recipe for a rare paste. If you are the same, prepare to lose your mind, because here it is: Maloine Paste. As of the nineteenth century, only six bottles had been known to have been made—and the recipe was especially hard to get ahold of. Apparently.
Palatine
This product, however, was probably slightly ahead of its time, comparatively speaking. It was an exfoliator, probably used by women with freckles. Whose faces felt like sandpaper. There is so much acid and grit in this cosmetic that it probably would burn and scrape the skin off a pig. And that’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever committed to writing, I think.
So, this recipe contains liquid ethanol, silver sand, and lemon juice. It also contains soft-soap (made with potassium) and olive oil.
Liquid ethanol—or spirits of wine—is just a distilled wine but the Victorians used it in cosmetics. When combined with the acid in the lemon juice, and the fats in the oil, it creates a pickling agent. Which is what chefs do to raw fish nowadays to create ceviche. Cooking without heat.
Almond
Aside from the disgusting creams made of lard or other thickening agents, I’m more or less generally OK with pastes. At least I’m OK with Almond Paste. Probably because we use it in pastries—most notably the American Bear Claw, which I had a dream about the night before writing this.
Anyway, I am OK with Almond Paste because it is safe to eat. And if it’s safe to eat, then it’s safe to rub on your face. But if you think about the American Bear Claw, I do not want to squeeze its contents onto my face. And the dream I had about this particular pastry was a nightmare. So maybe, in actuality, I do not think Almond Paste is OK.