cold cream
Cold Cream is the collective term for a protective and restorative ointment for the rapid regeneration of dry skin, against the sensation of tension and redness. The name is derived from the feeling of cold that you feel when applying it to the skin.
development
The ointment, which is often called "Cold Cream" today, is better known in France under the name "Cerat de Galien" (also "ceratum refrigerans") after the Greek doctor Galenos . Already in the second century he mixed water and beeswax with olive oil . Rose extracts provided a pleasant scent.
Over the centuries olive oil was exchanged for other vegetable oils; So-called mineral oils, with which there have also been experiments, are always hydrocarbons from petroleum production and cannot pass through the skin. The beeswax has remained an important component to this day, as it accelerates the regeneration of dry skin and counteracts the feeling of tension and reddening of the skin. In addition, the mineral borax was sometimes added, which has a weak disinfecting effect. The typical white color of the cream comes from the storage of the water in the fat / wax base.
According to Meyers Konversations-Lexikon , the ointment was prepared around the year 1890 as follows: “[...] a very mild, white, soft ointment that is particularly recommended for rough skin. They are made from 4 g of white wax, 5 parts of whale rat , 32 parts of almond oil, 16 parts of water and 1 part of rose oil, and a little glycerine is added. "
A product known as Cold Cream gained literary fame through, among other things, some passages in Thomas Mann's novel " The Magic Mountain ", in which it repeatedly serves to characterize local conditions ( Davos ) as well as characters in the novel and their personal sensitivities. In this case, it is a means that, after shaving (both methods of wet shaving, with the knife and the safety device, are spoken of early on here), applied to relieve so-called razor burn , but also to climatic conditions of overheating and facial flushing - one of the leitmotifs of the work - to provide a remedy.
Gustave Flaubert already mentions the cream in Madame Bovary (1857): "[...] for him she wasted an enormous amount of cold cream on her skin [...]"
Individual evidence
- ↑ Latin ceratum : wax ointment
- ↑ Hans-Rudolf Fehlmann: Ceratum Galeni. On the history of Unguentum leniens. In: Perspectives on Pharmaceutical History. Festschrift Rudolf Schmitz . Edited by Peter Dilg together with Guido Jüttner, Wolf-Dieter Müller-Jahncke and Paul U. Unschuld , Graz 1983, pp. 65–77.
- ^ Verlag des Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig and Vienna, fourth edition, 1885-1892, page 203.
- ↑ http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15711/15711-h/15711-h.htm