As a lover of all things skincare and all things Titanic, I’m constantly looking for ways to fuse those loves. Naturally, this means I’m super curious about the sorts of cosmetics the passengers on the Titanic might’ve used, so last year I went searching for some recipes from that time. I was specifically interested in lip balm as I’d never stumbled upon such a thing, but it seemed like they must have had something for chapped lips back then (and old fashioned cold cream gets plenty of attention already). My search led me to a fabulous old book with a small collection of skincare recipes, kicking off a lot of research, some very fun making, and a couple darling pots of lip balm that’s possibly the sort of thing Rose would’ve used when she sailed on the Titanic. Read on to learn more!
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Post Overview
The cookbook
The book in question is The Dudley book of cookery and household recipes by Georgiana Elizabeth Ward, Countess of Dudley. You can peruse the third impression—printed in 1909—in its entirely here. It’s nearly 300 pages long, and most of those pages are devoted to cookery, but towards the end there’s a collection of “Housekeeper’s And Toilet Recipes” that contains a ten skincare recipes. Ooh!
The recipes in this book are much more informal (andfar less specific) than modern recipes. They’re usually just a a couple paragraphs of vague instructions (eg: bake in a moderate oven, bake in a good oven) and varyingly specific amounts (eg: a little salt, a small teacupful of cream, a pint of milk, half a pound of flour).
For example, this recipe for Tea Buns is definitely not for an inexperienced baker. I consider myself to be a pretty experienced baker, but I’d need to do some research to learn what a “quick oven” is, temperature-wise (presumably something hot?), and I’d be guessing at how to combine all the ingredients and how/how much to work/prepare the dough.
From “The Dudley book of cookery and household recipes”
The recipe
The skincare recipes are similarly vague, but still make-able (I think!). As a lip balm devotee, this one caught my eye:
From “The Dudley book of cookery and household recipes” (page 252)
Lip Salve for Chapped Lips
From “The Dudley book of cookery and household recipes” (page 252)
1 oz sweet almond oil
0.25 oz white wax
0.5 oz spermaceti
1 drop cochineal
A few drops of oil of rosesMelt the ingredients gradually and work well so as to make into a smooth stiff cream. Run it into small pots for use.
We have a starting point! We’ll need to do a bit of detective work and translating to turn this into something we can make in 2025.
The measurements
First up—what sort of ounces does this recipe refer to? Fluid ounces and weight ounces aren’t the same (agh), and neither are British and American fluid ounces (double agh). As the author is British, I think it’s safe to assume she is using British ounces, so we can sort that out easily. Regarding weight vs. volume: today, fluid ounces are often denoted as “fl oz” rather than just “oz”, but not reliably enough for me to be 100% confident that this recipe is written in weight. So, I started flipping through the rest of the book to see if I could figure it out from how the other ingredients in the book were measured.
The recipes in this book use a mixture of weight and volume measurements in quite a few different units. Definite weight units are mostly pounds, but I did find one mention of “grammes”.
From “The Dudley book of cookery and household recipes” (page 219). Three-quarters of a pound is actually 340.2g, so the supplied conversion is off by more than 10%.
From the recipes I read, all volume measurements are units like, pints, quarts, “teacupfulls”, “dessertspoonfuls”, and “tablespoonfuls”, so I think we can assume the ounces in this cookbook are weight measurements rather than volume measurements. Thankfully a British and American weight ounce are the same, equalling 1/16th of a pound, or 28.349523125g (source).
Knowing we’re working in weights allows us do some rough percentage-izing to get an idea of the proportions of this lip salve. For our purposes, I’ll be assuming a “drop” weighs 0.03g.
- 1 oz | 28.35g | 57.01% sweet almond oil
- 0.25 oz | 7.09g | 14.26% white wax
- 0.5 oz | 14.17g | 28.49% spermaceti
- 1 drop | 0.03g | 0.06% cochineal
- A few drops | 0.09g | 0.18% of oil of roses
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The ingredients
Now that the amounts are sorted, the next thing we need to translate is the ingredients.
Oil of sweet almonds is easy; that’s sweet almond oil.
I initially thought “white wax” might be some sort of paraffin wax (which was first produced commercially in 1867) but some research showed that it is almost certainly bleached (white) beeswax. Check out this fascinating post by R.S. Fleming on Victorian cosmetics (with a very helpful list of translated ingredients at the end) to learn more.
Spermaceti
Spermaceti presented a bit of a challenge, so it gets its own section.
Spermaceti is a white waxy substance harvested from the head cavity of the sperm whale, and it has been illegal to sell for decades, so we need an alternative. This report mentions jojoba oil as an alternative, but jojoba oil is a liquid while spermaceti is described as a solid that was a “source of candle wax”, so this doesn’t seem like a good swap for this project.
Research into the composition of spermaceti led me down a winding path. Wikipedia says “it is composed mostly of wax esters (chiefly cetyl palmitate) and a smaller proportion of triglycerides”, but when I read the article linked at the end of that sentence as the source, it didn’t mention cetyl palmitate at all, only saying spermaceti is “mostly wax esters with a smaller fraction of triglycerides.” Hmm.
A Google Scholar search for “spermaceti fatty acid composition” turned up quite a lot of results.
Chapter 22 of Pharmacognosy (W.F. Tinto, T.O. Elufioye, J. Roach; published 2017) says spermaceti “contains fatty esters (65–95%) but also triglycerides (5–30%), free alcohols (1–5%), and acids (0–3%). Fatty esters are formed essentially of cetyl palmitate (C32) and cetyl myristate (C30)… it is now replaced by synthetic spermaceti made of pure cetyl palmitate or mixtures based on jojoba.”
Ok, that confirms what Wikipedia said. Cetyl palmitate is the ester of cetyl alcohol and palmitic acid. Palmitic acid can be sourced from any oil that contains palmitic acid, but it is mostly harvested from palm oil. Making Cosmetics sells vegan, RSPO cetyl palmitate, stating “cetyl palmitate is a natural substance as it occurs naturally in spermaceti of sperm whales.”
But then I turned up a short 1963 publication called “Composition of Spermaceti” by M. Wellendorf that was originally published in Nature.
The brief says “Spermaceti is said chiefly to consist of cetyl palmitate together with a small proportion of esters of other fatty acids, including lauric, myristic and stearic.” The wording of that sentence piqued my interest. After all—”is said to” is not the same thing as “is”. I got my hands on the full publication, and I’m glad I did, because it contains some good myth busting, concluding “Spermaceti is thus a much more complex mixture than originally suggested and accepted in numerous textbooks and pharmacopoeias.”
“As pure spermaceti has a very low iodine number and contains no free acids and alcohols, the saponification value which normally lies between 125 and 136 does not correspond well with the saponification value of cetyl palmitate, which is 16.7.
A very fine sample of spermaceti (iodine number 2.8, acid number 0.1 and saponifaction value 125.4) was saponified and the alcohol- and acid-fractions isolated. By gas chromatography the alcohol-fraction was shown to consist of 80 per cent cetyl alcohol, 12 per cent stearyl alcohol, 6 per cent myristyl alcohol and of 2 per cent hydrocarbons.
The acid-fraction was converted through the acid chlorides to methyl esters. By gas chromatography the percentage composition of the ester mixture was calculated by comparison with the pure methyl esters:
Caprinic acid methyl ester: 1%
Lauric: 15%
Myristic: 37%
Palmitic: 38%
Stearic: 8%
This composition is in rather good accordance with the saponification value.”
Ok, so… not cetyl palmitate, then? The percentages given by M. Wellendorf account for the composition of two portions of spermaceti (the isolated alcohol and acid fractions), but don’t discuss how large each of those portions are in relation to the spermaceti sample that was analyzed, making it difficult to translate the findings into some sort of actionable substitution for DIYing purposes.
In the end, I decided to just go ahead and use cetyl palmitate as my spermaceti alternative, figuring that even if it’s not the primary constituent of spermaceti, it’s a common enough alternative that there must be some decent overlap in terms of performance. I am, of course, totally unable to compare its performance to that of the original, so I’m just trusting that this industry-recommended swap is good enough.
Cochineal
This is another slightly twisty ingredient. Cochineal is an insect that produces carminic acid, and as such has been harvested for centuries to be processed into a vibrant red dye we call carmine. Pure carmine is a dry powder and this recipe calls for a “drop”, so I’m guessing it was mixed with some sort of liquid solvent. Alcohol, perhaps? I’ll be using carmine that’s been mixed with castor oil because that’s what I have.
Oil of roses
This is very probably rose essential oil (rose otto)—though perhaps a diluted product given how expensive it is. If we assume the essential oil was pure, a usage rate of ~0.18% is much higher than current allowable usage rates, which are closer to 0.01–0.08%. This is due to the methyleugenol content, as “the US National Toxicology Program (NTP) classified methyl eugenol as reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen” (source). Because of this, IFRA recommends a maximum of 0.00042% in lip products products, and methyleugenol content in Bulgarian rose otto essential oil tends to be in the 0.5–3.3% range according to Essential Oil Safety: A Guide for Health Care Professionals (2nd Edition, 2014) by Robert Tisserand & Rodney Young.
I don’t have any rose essential oil, so I’m going to use peppermint essential oil instead.
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The instructions
“Melt the ingredients gradually and work well so as to make into a smooth stiff cream. Run it into small pots for use.”
As with all the instructions in this book, the directions for this lip salve are pretty vague. I’ll use a water bath to melt as that should handle the “gradually” part quite nicely. A “bain marie” (water bath) is mentioned elsewhere in the book.
I’m interpreting “work well so as to make into a smooth stiff cream” as “stir constantly until creamy” because if we poured it straight away it wouldn’t really be a “smooth stiff cream”—it would be more of a firm balm.
To experiment, I poured the balm at four different times.
- Two tubes worth, immediately after stirring in the peppermint essential oil
- One jar at a light trace, shortly after the balm started to look hazy instead of transparent
- A second jar at a medium trace, when the balm was firmly in “milky” territory
- A third jar—I waited a bit too long for this last one and ended up more smearing/stuffing the last bit of lip salve into the final jar as it wasfar too thick to pour
Out of the four, the third jar was definitely the creamiest and was my favourite.
The finished lip salve is quite lovely! It’s creamy but not sticky, doing a nice job of balancing richness and slip. It is a perfectly lovely lip balm and would stand up well against many I’ve purchased in the last few years (outperforming quite a few of them, to be honest).
What do you think—will you be trying this old recipe out?