We have ten depictions of the Egyptian boy king Tutankhamun – most famously that unforgettable assembly of lapis and gold from his coffinette. But it is an 11th, latter-day addition that proves most evocative: a latex reconstruction of his features from CT scan data of his remains. The description of it, delivered by Professor David P. Silverman, the curator of the new blockbuster exhibition currently at the O2 (formerly the Dome), sounds unprepossessing: “Elongated skull, recessive chin, pronounced overbite, buck-toothed”. And, yet, the face is haunting: a pierced-eared, wary-eyed teen with a fleshy pout. He could be any comely adolescent, were it not for those unmistakable wings of sooty kohl.

The glamour of the ancient Egyptians is a major element of our eternal fascination with them. Entranced as we may be by the politics of Tutankhamun’s reign, it is the jet wigs and almond eyes that get us every time. For Alexander McQueen’s autumn/winter 08 catwalk collection, make-up artist Charlotte Tilbury paid homage to Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, using colours since released as the limited-edition line MAC for McQueen. So successful a look was it for Taylor that it took her some years to renounce it; a pastiche Egyptian rigout is still the favoured choice of girls at fancy-dress parties. Not only do we wish to walk like an Egyptian, we enjoy daubing our faces like one, too.

And yet, as Silverman cautions, it is hard to know precisely what ancient Egyptian maquillage looked like. For a start, much of the evidence originates among funerary artefacts designed to portray not the real world, but an idealised afterlife in which mortals took on extravagant immortal form. For another, the portraiture of the period is often symbolic and mannerist rather than realistic.

Moreover, Amenhotep IV (later, Akhenaten), Tutankhamun’s predecessor and probable father, transformed the whole of Egyptian society, art included, when he recast it from a pantheistic to a monotheistic culture devoted to the sun god Aten. This introduced a highly stylised mode of portraiture in which the royal family were depicted with elongated skulls and faces, spindly limbs and pear-shaped, sagging-bellied bodies to resemble the androgynous Aten. Although Tutankhamun reversed this revolution, its visual influence remains among his relics. Thus, Silverman demands supportive evidence from visual depictions, archaeological finds, texts and mummified remains before reaching any conclusions as to how the Egyptians actually looked.

Lisa Manniche, professor of Egyptology at the University of Copenhagen and an expert in the field of ancient beautification, argues that cosmetics held a focal place in Egyptian civilisation precisely because of their occurrence in converging sources. “In depictions of human beings, the prominence of the application of make-up is a chief characteristic, and among the earliest known artefacts are palettes used to grind the substances made to enhance the appeal of gods, royalty and ordinary mortals.”

There is evidence of a preoccupation with make-up by both genders and across the classes and signs that such practices carried many of the same connotations they hold today: practical, ornamental, sexual, symbolic, even sacramental. In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder describes Egypt as “of all the countries in the world, the best adapted for the production of unguents” – many of which would not be out of place today.

The eyes had it in ancient Egyptian culture, as they have it still. Indeed, Manniche asserts that “the very beginning of Egyptian-ness” can be dated to 3000BC and the unearthing of the ceremonial cosmetic palette of King Narmer. A fifth-dynasty relief reveals that even sacrificial cows had their eyes ringed with liner. Yet while it is possible to date artworks via the definition of the eyes – a heavy line, a subtly tapered one or none at all – archaeologists have to be alert to the possibility of a retro look.

There were two fashionable shades within the maquillage: emerald and black. Green eye paint was derived from malachite, a carbonite of copper, and black from galena, a deep-grey lead ore, and daubed both inside and outside the lashes. On the evidence of tomb equipment, kohl was kept in reeds, leaves, shells and small, purpose-built flacons. Its functions were varied. With sand and flies a perpetual nuisance, it was believed to have hygiene benefits. Both variants appear in medical texts as salves to combat infections and in-growing lashes. Liner was employed to diminish glare, “as used by today’s American-football players”, observes Silverman. Certainly, it lent men and women alike a beguiling, ox-eyed allure.

Kohl also had a religious, immortalising aspect, which accounts for its ubiquity in burial representations of Tutankhamun. Sexual attractiveness and the fertility it implied were judged necessary components of rebirth, as they had been in birth itself: in order to be reborn, the deceased had first to engage in ritual purification: the adorning of his eyes, not least.

One of the most notorious representations of Egyptian cosmetic craft occurs in the 19th-dynasty Erotic Papyrus 55001, housed in Turin’s Museo Egizio. A woman nonchalantly straddles an erect phallus while absorbed in the act of glossing her lips – brush in one hand, pot and mirror in the other. The exquisitely lovely bust of Tutankhamun’s likely stepmother and mother-in-law, Nefertiti, in the Ägyptisches Museum in Berlin, boasts a plushly rouged mouth. Manniche proposes, rather less desirably, that this was probably attributable to realgar, a sulphide of arsenic. Ochre may also have been used as a form of rouge and henna as a source of scarlet talons, while prostitutes sported tattoos of the god Bes to identify them as the racier sort of girl, and ward off venereal disease.

As in classical art, in matters of skin tone, the fairer sex tends to be represented as precisely this (here, somewhat yellow of complexion), while men are depicted as ruddier and swarthy. Under Akhenaten, these conventions became more “unisex” in accordance with the presiding deity’s androgyny, hence Nerfertiti’s peachy glow. There is evidence of metrosexual tendencies among even working-class men, who looked to cosmetics to protect their skin from the punishing elements. Documentation discovered in the village at Deir el-Medina for workers building New Kingdom tombs demonstrate that sesame and castor anointing oils were included in their pay packet. At the opposite end of the social scale, Tutankhamun was equipped with a fabulously butch cosmetics jar, bedecked with marauding animals set on the heads of defeated enemies and with a prodigious lion atop it. More than 3,000 years on, it still contains traces of the animal fat and vegetable resins it contained.

The tombs of 18th-dynasty princesses are stocked with cleansing cream made of oil, chalk and lime. Interestingly, the promise of future immortality did not prevent them striving to simulate eternal youth while still here on earth. Wrinkle remedies abounded – a typical example demanded frankincense gum, moringa oil and cyperus grass, ground and blended with fermented plant juice; another boasted gall of ox and powdered ostrich egg.

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