Eugene Rimmel and the 1872 mascara that changed lashes

The word mascara arrived in English by accident. In the 1840s, French soldiers fighting the colonial campaign in western Algeria occupied a fortified town called Mascara, where they encountered local women using a fine antimony powder around the eyes. The soldiers brought the powder home, and within a generation the Algerian city’s name had become the European shorthand for the kohl-like substance itself. By the time a French perfumer named Eugène Rimmel filed a patent in 1872 for a brushable lash darkener, the word mascara had already done thirty years of duty in French and was creeping into English beauty manuals.

Rimmel’s product was not the first attempt at lash colour. Egyptians had been smearing kohl on lashes for at least four thousand years, and Roman women used soot-and-resin mixes a thousand years after that. What Rimmel changed was the delivery system. His 1872 formulation took petroleum jelly (newly available from Robert Chesebrough’s Vaseline factory in Brooklyn, patented 1872 in the United States, the same year as Rimmel’s mascara) and combined it with rendered tallow and finely ground coal dust. The resulting paste was sold in a small porcelain pot with a flat fan brush, and it represented the first time a woman could buy a ready-made lash product instead of mixing her own from soot and elderberry juice on a saucer.

The Mascara of Mascara

The city of Mascara sits about ninety kilometres south of Oran in what is now northwest Algeria. The Wikipedia entry for the cosmetic credits its name to the French colonial period, when soldiers brought back the local antimony powder that women had been using around the eye since the Ottoman era. Lash Star Beauty’s history of mascara traces the same etymology, noting that the powder itself predates the French encounter by centuries; it was the European trade route, not the chemistry, that gave the product its modern name.

The connection to a real place matters because most beauty histories treat the early mascara story as if it began with Maybelline in 1915. That version is wrong by forty-three years. The Maybelline origin (Tom Williams mixing Vaseline and coal dust for his sister Mabel) is essentially Rimmel’s 1872 formula reinvented in Chicago, with no real chemistry change and no acknowledgement of the prior art. The reason Maybelline gets the credit in American beauty history is that Rimmel’s company stayed European until well into the 20th century, and Maybelline reached the American mass market first.

What the 1872 paste actually was

The Rimmel formula was tactile in a way modern mascara is not. The user warmed the pot in her hand, dipped the fan brush into the softened paste, and stroked it onto the lashes from base to tip. Two to three coats gave a defined, almost matte black lash; more than that, and the lashes would clump into a sticky fringe by midday. The petroleum jelly base meant the product never fully dried. According to the 1886 Peck & Snyder Catalogue, which advertised a competing product called Mascaro or Water Cosmetique, Rimmel’s category was already crowded by the late Victorian period: at least four manufacturers were selling brushable lash darkeners by the 1880s, all using variations on the same petroleum-and-soot recipe.

The 1894 manual Lynn’s Practical Hints for Making-Up, written for stage actors, gives one of the clearest period descriptions: “to darken eyelashes, paint with mascara, or black paint, with a small brush. Take care not to let any drop into the eye, as it stains the white.” That last warning matters. The carbon black used in the formula was not eye-safe in the modern sense, and Victorian beauty advice columns are full of warnings about reapplying mascara too aggressively. The lash chemistry of the era was effective and visually striking, but it sat on the lashes for the whole day without setting, which meant that any rub of the eye redistributed the colour across the lid.

Why the formula held until the cake mascara era

The Rimmel paste dominated the lash market for almost fifty years, with only minor formulation tweaks (paraffin instead of petroleum jelly in some versions, lamp black instead of crushed coal in others). The reason the formula held was that nothing better existed. The next real chemistry shift was Maybelline’s cake mascara in 1917, which dried by pressing pigment into a wax base and applying it with a wet brush. Cake mascara was less greasy and held its position on the lash for longer, but it required water to activate, which meant a tin of mascara, a small brush, and a glass of water on the dressing table. It was slower than the Rimmel paste, but the finish was cleaner.

The pasted Rimmel format did not actually disappear until the tube-and-wand format arrived in 1957, when Helena Rubinstein’s chemist Hazel Bishop developed an automatic-wand mascara that scraped the brush against a small wiper inside the tube. That single piece of plastic engineering ended the open-pot era and turned mascara into a one-handed product. Rimmel the company kept selling pot mascara into the 1960s in some European markets, mostly to stage and film performers who preferred the slow dry time for layering.

The look the 1872 paste made possible

You can see the Rimmel-era lash in early film. Theda Bara’s vamp roles between 1915 and 1919 used the petroleum-and-soot mascara aggressively, building the lash into the heavy, oily black ring that read in silent film as predatory glamour. The 1920s flapper look (see the 1920s flapper tutorial for the modern recreation) is essentially the same lash chemistry pushed further: layer the paste until the lashes clump into spikes, then partially comb them out with a metal lash comb. Clara Bow’s signature look in It (1927) is Rimmel-style paste plus a small triangle of kohl in the inner corner, with no shadow on the lid itself.

Victorian-era makeup before Rimmel was, by today’s standards, almost invisible. The respectable middle-class face in 1870 wore powdered rice on the skin, a barely tinted lip salve, and nothing on the eyes. Rimmel’s mascara created the conditions for the painted face that defined the next century. The historical line from his patent to a modern cat eye is shorter than it looks; the formula changed three times in 150 years, but the social premise (that a defined lash is part of a complete face) has been continuous since 1872.

The next big shift in lash chemistry is happening now, with fibre-extending tubing formulas that wrap each lash in a polymer sleeve. The sleeve technology is genuinely different from anything Rimmel would have recognised. But the impulse is the same one his fan brush served in 1872: a darker, longer-looking lash, applied in under a minute, sold in a small pot meant to fit in a pocket.