Beauty in classical Chinese medicine

What this page is

In classical Chinese medicine, beauty was treated as an outcome of internal health and good Blood, and the surviving texts on facial preparations are the earliest Chinese record of what would now be called cosmetic dermatology.

This page is a history. It sets out what the texts say, period by period, with the original passages and their translations, and it explains the ideas behind them. It is not a set of recipes. Nothing here describes how to make or apply these preparations, and the later part of the page explains why that line is drawn deliberately.

The record is richer than most readers expect. The Tang and Song formularies contain hundreds of facial preparations, and the materia medica kept absorbing cosmetic uses into its entries. What follows is a sample with the sources named, not a survey.

Han: the earliest records

The earliest layer is not a cosmetic manual. It is the materia medica, and the cosmetic use is one line inside an entry about a food.

The Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing (神农本草经), the Han compilation at the base of the materia medica, has an entry for 白瓜子, winter melon seed: 「主令人悦澤，好顏色，益氣不飢，久服輕身耐老」. The translation is that it makes a person's complexion lustrous and of good colour, supplements Qi, prevents hunger, and with long use lightens the body and delays old age.

The Ming Yi Bie Lu (名医别录), the supplement to that classic, adds the detail that turns a food into a cosmetic: 「可作面脂，令面悦澤」, that it can be made into a facial fat and makes the face lustrous and moist. That is the earliest clear statement in the record of a herb being made into a facial preparation.

The entry is worth pausing on for two reasons. It shows that cosmetic use began inside medicine rather than beside it. And it shows the aim in its own words: lustre and good colour, which is a different ambition from the modern language of anti-ageing. The picture a physician would have treated with it was one of Blood Deficiency or dryness, not a problem of the skin alone. Dong Gua Zi has its own page, with the classical lines in full.

Tang: the facial formulary

The Tang is where the field becomes recognisable. Sun Simiao's Qian Jin Yao Fang (备急千金要方), completed in the seventh century, contains a chapter of facial disorders with more than eighty formulas, and it is the single richest source for the section.

The chapter is juan 6, part 2 (卷第六下), under the disorders of the seven orifices, and the facial chapter is 面病第九. Verified against the text, it includes:

• 五香散, a large aromatic wash opening with 「治皰黶黑運赤氣，令人白光潤」, for spots, darkening and redness.
• 面脂主悅澤人面耐老方, the archetypal 面脂, a facial fat for lustre and against ageing, built on Bai Zhi, winter melon seed, Chuan Xiong, Fang Feng and Tu Si Zi, among others.
• 玉屑面膏方, 「治面無光澤，皮肉皺黑，久用之令人潔白光潤」, for a face without lustre, with wrinkled and darkened skin.
• A sequence of 澡豆 washing powders, including 桃人澡豆 whose stated aim is 「主悅澤」.
• 白瓜子丸, whose aim is 令色白, and a 桃花丸 in the same family.
• 鹿角散, a striking name for a formula said to give an old face the look of a young one.

What the chapter shows is a professional formulary: preparations are classified by the problem they address, they are built from named herbs, and they are made by people who expected to make them. The idea that the face reflects the internal state is present in the theory, but the chapter is mostly practical.

herbal-face-masks covers the modern use of this material, with the safety that applying herbs to the face requires.

Song: the encyclopaedic chapter

The Song produced the great imperial compendia, and the one that matters here is the Sheng Ji Zong Lu (圣济总录), compiled by the imperial medical bureau in the early twelfth century. Its juan 101 is a chapter on the face and body (面体门) with sections for scaling of the head, facial spots, facial blemishes, acne, warts, body odour and scars, followed by a chapter on hair.

Verified against the text, the chapter contains:

• 面皯 section: 白附子膏方, whose stated aim is 令面白悅澤; 白瓜子丸方, 令光白潤澤; 玉屑膏方, 令光白, built on jade, coral, magnolia bark and winter melon seed; and a 白芷膏方 whose ingredients are a group of white herbs, among them Bai Zhu and Bai Lian, Bai Zhi and Fu Ling.
• 粉刺 section, on what would now be called acne: a rouge-like 赤膏方, a 白蔹膏, a 丹砂散 built on cinnabar and peach blossom, and a 菟丝汁塗方 using the juice of Tu Si Zi sprouts.
• 灭瘢痕 section, on scars: 白僵蚕膏方, built on Bai Jiang Can (白僵蚕), which is still a herb used for the face and has no page in this compendium yet.
• 髭发门, on hair: formulas for darkening the beard and hair, among them 一宿乌方 and 倒行油方, and formulas described as 益顏色, improving the complexion.

The Song chapter is more systematic than the Tang, and it is also more visibly a pharmacopoeia: the same "white herb" group recurs across several formulas, which is the pattern later tradition would formalise.

Ming: the materia medica absorbs it

The Ming brings the cosmetic material back into the materia medica, and the decisive text is Li Shizhen's Ben Cao Gang Mu (本草纲目, 1578). Its chapter on climbing plants (草之七) carries several of the cosmetic claims that later practice would lean on.

• He Shou Wu: the entry's stated indications include 「益血氣，黑髭發，悅顏色」, benefiting Blood and Qi, darkening the beard and hair, and improving the complexion. Li Shizhen's commentary places it among the Liver and Kidney medicines.
• Tu Si Zi: the entry records, quoting Zhen Quan, 「久服去面皯，悅顏色」, that long use removes facial darkness and improves the complexion.
• 覆盆子: 「悅澤肌膚」 and 「食之令人好顏色」, that it makes the skin lustrous and gives a person a good colour, with a separate line that the juice rubbed on the hair keeps it from going white.
• 旋花: 「去面䵟黑色，媚好益氣」, removing dark discolouration of the face.
• 牵牛子: two external preparations in the entry, one for 面上粉刺 and one for 面上雀斑, both given as washes.

The pattern in the Ming is different from the Tang and Song. The cosmetic claim is now one line inside a herb's medical entry rather than a formula in a formulary, which is the shape it has kept in the literature since. The conditions those entries address are read in the tradition as Kidney Essence Deficiency and Yin Deficiency, the deep reserves rather than the surface.

Bai Zhi and face-mapping show how the materia medica and the diagnostic tradition connect: the same herb that a formulary used on the face is also given a reading in terms of the channels it enters.

The aims, and the danger

The aims of these preparations have to be translated faithfully, because they are part of the historical record and because they are not the aims of this website.

The formulas repeatedly state three goals: 悅澤, lustre and moisture; 好顏色, a good colour; and 令色白 or 令面白, making the face white or pale. The first two are about the look of health. The third is a beauty ideal of the period, and it appears often enough that it cannot be left out of an honest history. This site does not present it as a goal, and nothing here should be read as advice about changing the colour of the skin. Pigmentation as a clinical subject belongs on its own pages, Skin pigmentation and Melasma.

The second thing that cannot be left out is what some of these preparations contained. Reading the texts is a lesson in why the tradition moved on:

• 鈆丹, lead oxide, appears in 鈆丹散 in the Tang chapter and in the Song 白瓜子丸方.
• 蜜陀僧 and 胡粉, lead compounds, appear in facial fats and creams in both periods.
• 水銀, mercury, and 水銀霜 appear in Tang and Song facial formulas, and mercury is used in Song hair preparations.
• 硃砂 and 雄黃, mercury and arsenic sulphides, appear alongside them.
• 烏頭, aconite, appears in a Tang facial preparation.

These are poisons. Lead and mercury are absorbed through the skin, they accumulate, and they cause irreversible harm. Nothing on this page is an instruction to make or apply any of these preparations, and no reader should reconstruct one. The reason to name them is that a history which omits them would be both dishonest and dangerous.

What was left out, and why

Three things are missing from this page on purpose, and it is worth saying so rather than letting the record look complete.

太平圣惠方 (Tai Ping Sheng Hui Fang), the Song imperial formulary of 992, certainly has facial material. Its chapter references could not be verified for this page, so it is not cited. A book-level mention would have been easy and would have added nothing that the verified chapters do not already show.

御药院方 (Yu Yao Yuan Fang), the Yuan-era imperial dispensary text, is often credited with the formula known as 七白膏, the "seven whites paste", which has become the emblem of this whole tradition. That attribution could not be verified, and the name is therefore not used. What the page does instead is show the verified earlier version of the same idea: the Song 白芷膏方, built on a group of white herbs, in the 面皯 section of 圣济总录 juan 101.

Numbers and methods. The texts give quantities and preparation steps for almost every formula. None are reproduced here. A history page that includes them becomes a recipe page by any reasonable reading, and for the preparations containing lead and mercury it becomes something worse.

These omissions are recorded in the section's planning documents so that a later researcher can pick them up.

What this history is not

It is not a golden age, and it is not a claim that the old preparations worked. The texts record what practitioners did and what they said it achieved; they do not record controlled observation, and a formula surviving for a thousand years is evidence of transmission rather than of effect.

It is not a contrast between a natural past and a chemical present, either. The past included lead and mercury. The present has better tools for finding out what works, and the honest use of a history like this one is to see what the tradition was trying to do and then test the parts that can be tested.

It is also not a single tradition. The Tang, the Song and the Ming differ in what they emphasise and how they are organised, and the differences matter to anyone trying to read the sources.

What the record does give is context. The practices described elsewhere in this section have roots, and those roots are worth knowing before deciding what, if any of it, is worth keeping.

Safety

Evidence

This page is a history, and it carries no badge for that reason. Its sources are primary texts, and the method is translation and verification rather than measurement.

What the studies did not test. These are the human studies we found on PubMed (searched October 2026). None that tests whether any of these historical preparations worked, and none is cited here as if it did. A thousand years of copying a formula is evidence that it was transmitted, not that it worked.

What is verified, and how. Every passage on this page was read in a digitised text of the work named, and the chapter or entry is given beside it. The Tang chapter is 千金要方 juan 6 part 2, 面病第九. The Song chapter is 圣济总录 juan 101, 面体门. The Ming quotations are from 本草纲目, 草之七. The Han citations are given as book, grade and entry, with "entry not confirmed" where the record does not supply one.

What this means. The historical record on this page is as accurate as careful checking can make it. It says nothing about whether the preparations were effective, and the page does not claim that they were.

Sources

Classical record