High Foreheads as a Sign of Intellect and Health: Why Renaissance Women Shaved Their Eyebrows and Hairlines (12 Photos)

Powdered dried toad, lupin flour, and burnt alum—this was how Countess Caterina Sforza got rid of her hairline. Italian noblewomen of the 15th and 16th centuries passed such recipes from hand to hand, as a high, hairless forehead was no mere fashion whim, but a sign of intellect and noble lineage. This standard was established by the poets Petrarch and Ariosto, and ultimately codified in a treatise by the monk Agnolo Firenzuola. Here is how poetry transformed into a dangerous cosmetic manual.





The Forehead as a Manifesto: How Poets Set the Trend

The Renaissance ideal of female beauty was defined by poets. Francesco Petrarch first saw his Laura in 1327 at the Church of Sainte-Claire in Avignon. The poet dedicated

Canzoniere

to her—a collection of sonnets in which his beloved appeared as an almost otherworldly being. Three decades later, Laura’s features became the benchmark for Italian nobility: pale skin, golden hair, and a high, open forehead.



Petrarch and Laura depicted in a mid-15th-century Italian miniature

Ludovico Ariosto went even further, crafting a far more precise image. In Canto VII of his poem

Orlando Furioso

(1516), he describes the enchantress Alcina: her forehead—serene and smooth—resembled polished ivory. For female readers in the 16th century, these lines sounded like more than praise; they served as a direct instruction: the forehead had to be fair, broad, and flawlessly smooth, without a single hair along the hairline.

Agnolo Firenzuola Devises the Formula for the Perfect Forehead

Poetic imagery soon hardened into a strict set of rules. The monk Agnolo Firenzuola (1493–1543) wrote the treatise

On the Beauty of Women

. The book was published in 1548, after the author's death. Firenzuola did not merely celebrate beauty; he dismantled it into component parts, detailing exactly what the forehead, eyebrows, eyes, and even toes should look like.





"The Birth of Venus" by Sandro Botticelli, 1485–1486

The forehead received the most detailed description in the treatise: spacious—meaning broad—high, fair, and serene, like the surface of a mirror on a calm day.

The book instantly became a practical guidebook for noblewomen. If nature did not grant the desired proportions, aristocrats achieved the ideal themselves: shaving hair down to the root and ruthlessly plucking anything extra.



Portrait of a Lady in Red, Florence, anonymous master, 15th century

This aesthetic rule is clearly visible in portraits of the era. Netherlandish painter Petrus Christus depicted ladies with receded hairlines, as did anonymous Florentine masters. Skin in these portraits resembles porcelain, and the forehead takes up nearly a third of the face.

The Sin of Vanity: How the Church and Doctors Fought Hair

Art trends do not explain everything. Renaissance women believed that excess hair compromised the very nature of femininity, as body hair was considered a masculine trait. Physicians linked thick eyebrows to a coarsened voice and temperament. Some treatises even warned of infertility. For a marriageable lady, such a diagnosis could cost her a future husband.



Portrait of Isabella of Portugal, Workshop of Rogier van der Weyden, c. 1450

The Church viewed these procedures with obvious suspicion: preachers declared hair removal a tool of seduction, while rouge, white powder, and cosmetics were branded as sins of vanity. However, stern sermons from the pulpit rarely stopped fashion lovers. The desire to conform to secular ideals far outweighed the fear of sin. As a result, fashion almost always triumphed over ecclesiastical morality.



"Virgin Among Virgins", anonymous master of the Netherlandish school, 15th century

Recipes from Secret Books

The gentlest way to achieve a smooth forehead was simple plucking—a tedious but safe process. Special chemical formulations worked much faster. Their recipes were passed down through generations and recorded in household books of secrets alongside medical remedies.



Portrait of a Lady, Circle of Rogier van der Weyden, 15th century

One famous recipe survives in the manuscript

Gli Experimenti

by Countess Caterina Sforza, ruler of Forlì and Imola. Compiled before 1509, the recipe was titled "To Make Hair Fall Out and Never Grow Again": dried toad was ground into powder and mixed with lupin flour and burnt alum. The mixture was boiled in water, strained through a dense cloth, and left to steep for eight days before being applied to the skin.



A page from Countess Caterina Sforza's manuscript "Gli Experimenti"

Sforza’s manuscript was not the only source of such advice. Italian ladies exchanged similar recipes through doctors and apothecaries. The results frequently left skin irritated with chemical burns. Yet demand for these products never slackened: the urge to conform to beauty standards overcame caution.



Portrait presumed to depict Caterina Sforza by Lorenzo di Credi, 1481–1483

The Price of Beauty: Cosmetic Powder and Its Consequences

A smooth forehead was only half the ideal: the skin also had to glow white like porcelain. In 1562, physician Giovanni Marinello published the book

Gli Ornamenti delle Donne

(

The Ornaments of Women

). Within its pages, he gathered dozens of recipes for skin lightening. One required twelve egg whites, white rose petals, elderflowers, and lilies. These ingredients were thoroughly ground with pearl powder and ceruse—a white lead pigment produced on an industrial scale by Venetian workshops specifically for cosmetics.



"Mona Lisa" by Leonardo da Vinci, 1503–1506

The lead in the makeup slowly destroyed the skin and killed hair follicles. As a result, the face demanded an increasingly thick layer of coverage. Many fashionable women gradually suffered from heavy metal poisoning. Meanwhile, doctors attributed hair loss, dark teeth, and chronic weakness to anything but cosmetics. Fashion historians still find complaints in archives from ladies suffering severe headaches after applying white lead powder.

Bidding Farewell to Eyebrows

The look was completed by a total lack of eyebrows. Unless nature gifted a woman a nearly invisible brow line, eyebrows were shaved or plucked to the very base, leaving only a faint hint above the eyes. An open gaze was believed to emphasize a refined nature and purity of thought.



Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, late 16th century

The fashion for a bare forehead did not disappear with the Italian Renaissance. On the contrary, it spread to the English court, where it was championed by Queen Elizabeth I herself. By the end of the 16th century, this look was no longer considered extreme; it had become a recognizable sign of noble birth. Thus, women across Europe willingly endured pain and risked their health for the sake of a fashionable ideal.



Portrait of Mary of Burgundy by Michael Pacher, 1490

Behind the serene faces in Renaissance portraits lies a history of women's long struggle with their own bodies. A high forehead and smooth skin demanded pain, time, and occasionally dangerous chemical mixtures. The price of failure was high—ruined skin or accusations of vanity. Today, such extremes seem baffling. Yet the habit of reshaping one's appearance to fit external beauty standards has not disappeared. Only the tools have changed.

What beauty trends of today do you think will look just as crazy to our descendants 500 years from now?