Everything about the 1841 Paris first night of Giselle comes as a surprise: flaming gaslight, wires for flying, trapdoors – and the backstage clouds of powder and white handprints all over Albrecht’s dark velvet tunic. Giselle was the first full expression of the Romantic age’s artform, ballet, and its make-up was in pulverised form.

And in fact there wasn’t much of it visible, just a pale glow, that being the current mode. The 1789 French Revolution had wiped the faces of men and women of heavy slap based on toxic lead and oxides. After that, the ideal, even for stage beauty, was natural, with discreet use of mild pigments like extract of safflower or crushed cochineal beetle in safe bases. Skin was paled with rice powder for the corps and iridescent pearl powder (bismuth oxychloride) for primas, mixed with chalk or talc (both absorbed sweat), loaded into a gauze bag and patted on. Violet-tinted powder etherealised faces.

In illustrations of 1840s and 50s ballet, powder over cold cream simplifies faces to a peg doll’s, Fanny Elssler’s long nose and Marie Taglioni’s retroussé perk-up register alike. They have pomaded-in cherry lips and blush, perhaps brushed ash on brows; pioneer primas were brunettes, which helped. Photography was new, and portrait engravings tended to the generic, so the audience had no pre-interest in the tiny faces on big gaslit stages, and dancers were viewed bunhead to en-pointe toe, their movements and overall styling the attraction.

Ballerinas began to follow actresses, whose photographs were widely circulated by the 1860s, into exploring exaggerated features – the glamour of acknowledged artifice – and to balance post-Romantic bulked-out hair. They were selective about Leichner products and imitations, since the sticks dragged skin, clogged pores and had to be slathered off with gunk and rags, but they liked his face-powders matched to approved skin shades, and thin liner sticks of red and pink for lips, or cool colours for eyelids. Look at local and guest dancers in Marius Petipa’s St Petersburg ballets as, and after, greasepaints joined the repertoire, and you see near-nude eyes strengthen and elongate. Nothing suggested nubility like eyelashes evident from the back of the stalls, and old tricks with candle soot and almond oil were superseded by a new product, Mascaro (not a typo), aka Cosmetique, a little block of dark-tinted soap applied with a small brush, originally devised to stiffen, and cover white hairs in moustaches or beards.

These complicating looks were still put on by the dancers themselves, the primas helped by maid or dresser. Carrington-Lee says that’s still how it works: she confers with the cast on faces in harmony with any show that’s not through-designed down to the eyebrows. The aim is not uniformity but enhanced legibility visible right to the top gallery. The dancers take the ideas and do the work, the corps entering their roles as they apply cosmetics, principals coming to her chair bringing lucky hairpins, favourite music, for styling and confessional chat. She teases that the boys try to get away with just the one line under the eyes, standard these 150 years, although she’s delighted by first soloist James Streeter’s skilled, curious use of make-up for better ownership of his role. It extends his physical control over his body.

Carrington-Lee’s first consideration about the look of a new production is practical, needing diplomatic negotiation with all departments: how long an interval between short ballets, acts, doubled parts? Can dancers enter and exit costumes quickly without disturbing face and hair? Can an elaborate paint job be done in under 15 minutes, or, if longer, broken into short takes (as being static, unstretched, before going on stage will harm performance)? For the multiple Frida Kahlos and sacred deer of ENB’s Broken Wings (2016), the company’s make-up sponsor funded nine body-painters who began work at 4pm (all those Frida mono-brows to be drawn on).

Logistic problems aren’t unprecedented. The Ballets Russes total-art approach included make-up intentions in costume designs, often demanding part-body cover, including most of the Leichner range for Schéhérazade (1910). For well over a century darker-pigmented cosmetic on a white skin was a ballet norm – Leichner instruction charts specify the number of the stick to imitate the world’s ‘exotic’ skin tones – while actual people in those colours remained unwelcome in ballet until recently. Under costumes, the Russes dancers originally wore skin-tight, wrist-length jersey tops dyed, like their tights, to a character’s tone so only face and hands needed fresh making-up between an evening’s several ballets. When Serge Diaghilev banned these garments, all the company protested at the extra effort.

As Carrington-Lee points out, dancers professionally evaluate their own faces as a controllable extension of their body line. Their make-up can consciously epitomise a time: no movie faces were more Art Deco than Russes dancers’ in Le Train Bleu or Les Biches (both 1924). More often they refract fashion, seeming timelessly balletic live on stage but revealing the production date when the photographs are seen years later. The Scouse brows of now are going to date like Tamara Karsavina’s in The Firebird (1910), unplucked, soap-stiffened, and darkened.