Director until 2015. She was a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London from 2015 to 2020, and Visiting Researcher at the University of Portsmouth 2021 to 2024.
Lincoln applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Perfection: 400 Years of Women's Quest for Beauty, and reported the following:
Page 99 explains that Victorians often judged a woman’s skin problems to be the result of an irregular lifestyle and therefore a matter of personal failure. From the 1840s, active management of the skin was essential to a woman’s beauty routine, partly owing to new discoveries about the function of the skin’s pores and glands. A growing acceptance that skin had to ‘breathe’ added weight to criticism of tight corsets, and specialists advocated cold bathing to tone the pores.Visit Margarette Lincoln's website.
This page gives a partial indication of what the book is about. Readers using the Page 99 Test would see that the book is about the pressure on women to look their best. They would see that Victorian judgements about a woman’s appearance might be prejudiced and based on imperfect scientific knowledge. They might gather that the book considers body shape and hygiene as well as skin. They might even appreciate that much beauty advice has been whimsical.
But the book actually deals with an extended time span, from 1650 to the present. It is holistic in approach, covering hair, teeth, body shape, diets, spa retreats, makeup and hygiene, as well as skin. It is well illustrated and contains much humorous detail, exploring the lotions, deodorants, undergarments, spells and beauty aids which have seduced users over the centuries. And it is also inclusive, exploring expressions of gender identity, and showing how a history of perceptions of beauty is inseparable from ideas about race and the history of colonialism. Read on!
The Page 99 Test: London and the Seventeenth Century: The Making of the World's Greatest City.
--Marshal Zeringue
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