A display of Body Arts can be found on the first floor of the Pitts Rivers Museum in Oxford.
The displays are divided into '
Temporary Arts', such as cosmetics and body painting; '
Permanent Arts', such as piercing and tattooing and body shaping; and '
Lifecycle Arts', with ornaments and dress worn at ceremonies marking: birth, puberty, marriage, adulthood, and death.
Local tattooist, Bob 'Eagle' Smith, donated some of his old equipment to the museum, including tattoo needles and a tattoo machine and inks, together with photographs of him at work in Oxford, England in the 1990s.
There were designs used by people in Nigeria to paint their bodies, using the seeds of
uli plants.
Next to a variety of combs from around the world were some false eye lashes. Eylure 107 is an angled lash with a smooth, vintage finish.
A 5,300-year-old mummified body in an Austrian glacier was found with a large ear piercing, and to this day piercings are popular. From Oxford, England body piercing equipment, donated in 2001, was on display.
We may think it strange to see the cane belts used in Nagaland India to reduce the size of these men's waists but the ideal body shape continues to change. In our own culture, bodybuilding, using extreme diets and exercise; and breast enlargements, using surgical techniques, allow people to change their body form closer to their ideal.
In some places binding has been used in very young babies to permanently change the shape of skulls. In Ancient Peru people aspired to have a beautiful head shape and aimed to look a bit like the exaggerated form of the model.
Look at the museums own web site
body arts to go into much more detail.
