I saw this, and found aspects of it very annoying as it had no references and there is a lot of nonsense talked about the House of Rising Sun song which the article did not address. But I agree it is interesting and might have started a thread on it had Mudcat not seemed to be offline all day yesterday! So thanks, Jack.

There are a number of threads here which illustrate the different ideas.

And some of the 'facts' reported aren't as clear-cut as they appear. For example, the idea that rouge-pots equals prostitutes has been challenged. It seems that some men (dandies) made use of rouge, for example.

Here is a more academic report, which does discuss the rouge 'controversy' in a little more detail.