Vizor - Vizard Mask As Ladies Fashion Accessory

Vizard Mask As Ladies Fashion Accessory

The word vizard (sometimes visard) is used in Shakespearean English to refer to a visor, a mask, or a disguise (ex. "There, then, that vizard, that superfluous case, that hid the worse and show'd the better face." -- Love's Labors Lost V.ii.387)

Vizards were a fashion accessory for upper-class European ladies - gentlewomen - in the late 16th and into the 18th century. These light-weight masks were intended to protect a lady's face from sunlight while traveling in an open carriage, to preserve the (then) fashionable "look" of pale skin and rosy cheeks. This paleness contrasted with the sun-tanned skin of working-class women. Playwright William Shakespeare mentions this sun-adverse fashion craze in his play of 1590/91, Two Gentlemen of Verona (Act 4: Scene 4): "But since she did neglect her looking-glass; And threw her sun-expelling mask away, The air hath starved the roses of her cheeks; And pinched the lily-tincture of her face; That now she is become as black as I".

The Norwich Castle Museum in England has a rare surviving example of a lady's sun vizard. The plain (unadorned), oval-shaped mask covers the entire face, with two eye-holes and small opening at the mouth. It is made of black velvet, the inside lined with silk and stiffened with white paper; there is a glass bead attached to inside of the mouth opening, an aid to keeping the mask in place by gripping the bead with ones' teeth. The voluminous hairdos worn by ladies at this time prevented the mask from being secured by a ribbon tied around the head.