Stanley
Jacobs is a plastic surgeon whose hobby is Egyptology. He's studied
many an ancient document, but one called the Edwin Smith Papyrus spoke
to him in particular. It's 5,000 years old, and describes the surgical
procedures of Egypt at the time.
A plastic surgeon
himself, he found that most of the cases were about “really good
reconstruction after traumatic injury, of the nose, the neck, the spinal
cord,” and that its techniques were surprisingly well thought out for a
millennia-old book. What really intrigued him, though, was a recipe at
the back of the book, titled “Transforming an Old Man Into a Youth.”
This
section of the papyrus is a long and complicated set of instructions
for making what is, essentially, a face cream. The original translator
of the papyrus, the Egyptologist James Breasted, hadn’t been much
impressed by it, writing that the recipe “proves to be nothing more than
a face paste believed to be efficacious in removing wrinkles.”
As
a doctor who spends a lot of time thinking about skin, beauty, and age,
though, Jacobs wasn’t so quick to discount it. “I realized that if
they’re that serious about their surgical treatments, they’re probably
serious about this,” he says.
The face cream recipe
was difficult to translate, because one ingredient was called by a word
nobody seemed to know. But Jacobs keep looking, and the answers he got
led to other questions, which led to a possible new/old way to care for
skin. Read the story of
Jacobs and the ancient face cream at Atlas Obscura.
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