Reply To: Looking For a Mamar Chazal About Cosmetics

Since there may be some confussion here I am reposting.

Hi all,

Thanks for your answers to my post a couple months back. I stumbled across what I was looking for. Actually, I was incorrect the Medrash is talking about purfume (maybe it can be stretched to cosemetics).

It is in Medrash Rabba (Breishis,Parsha 17:8) it says as follows (skipping the parts that aren’t relevant):

They asked Rebbi Yehoshua…Why does a women require perfume and a man doesn’t require perfume? He said to them,”Adom is created from earth and earth never decays. And Chava was created from bone. Mashel – If you leave meat for 3 days without salt it starts to putrefy.”

As I was getting at in my first post the Medrash implies that perfume isn’t just an enhancement for women rather it is an intrinsic need like salt for meat.