Makeup Trivia
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96 free Makeup trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
42 free Makeup trivia questions with answers. Makeup has a history as old as Egypt and a business as big as any on earth, and this quiz covers both. It ranges from kohl, Greek white lead and the poisonous Venetian ceruse to the first lipstick tube, the invention of Pan-Cake foundation, the lifelong feud between Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein, and the modern giants: L'Oréal, Revlon, Maybelline, MAC, Sephora, Chanel No. 5, Fenty and Kylie. Easy questions cover things anyone with a makeup bag knows. Harder ones ask what mascara literally means, who patented the swivel lipstick, where Rubinstein sold her first cream, which race Arden's horse won, and why Chanel picked the number five. It suits a beauty-themed party, a salon quiz or a general-knowledge round. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on cosmetics, their history, and the brands and founders, and each question carries its source.
30 of 96 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The words cosmetics and cosmos share the Greek root kosmos, which meant what?
Order and ornament
Order and ornament: to the Greeks, kosmein was to arrange or adorn. Pythagoras is said to have been the first to call the universe a kosmos, for its orderliness.
Q 02Which red pigment, long used in lipstick, is made from crushed cochineal insects?
Carmine
Carmine comes from carminic acid, which the cochineal, a scale insect that lives on prickly pear cacti, produces to put off predators.
Q 03Which singer and actress founded the makeup brand Rare Beauty in 2020?
Selena Gomez
Selena Gomez named the brand after her album Rare. Part of its sales goes to the Rare Impact Fund, which she set up to pay for mental health services.
Q 04Which makeup brand is best known for its Naked eyeshadow palettes?
Urban Decay
Urban Decay was started in 1996 by Sandy Lerner, a co-founder of Cisco Systems, as a revolt against pink and beige: its tag line asked, 'Does pink make you puke?'
Q 05Venetian ceruse, the prized 16th-century skin whitener, was made from water, vinegar and what?
Lead
Lead gave ceruse its smooth white finish and its danger: it damaged skin and thinned hair. The London society beauty Maria, Countess of Coventry, is believed to have died of it in 1760.
Q 06Which queen is most associated with the fashion for bright red lips and a stark white face?
Elizabeth I
Elizabeth I's portraits made the look official. In her last years painters worked from an approved 'Mask of Youth', so the ageing queen kept the same smooth white face on canvas.
Q 07Which Japanese cosmetics giant began in 1872 as a Western-style pharmacy in Tokyo?
Shiseido
Shiseido was opened by Arinobu Fukuhara, once head pharmacist to the Japanese navy. After a trip to America and Europe he put a soda fountain in the shop, which grew into the Shiseido Parlour restaurants.
Q 08Which Parisian perfume house is widely credited with selling the first lipstick in stick form?
Guerlain
Guerlain is said to have launched it in 1870 as Ne m'oubliez pas, 'forget me not'. The credit is traditional: one historian of cosmetics reports finding no first-hand evidence for it.
Q 09Which allergy-tested skincare and makeup brand did the Estée Lauder company launch in 1968?
Clinique
Clinique was shaped by Evelyn Lauder, Estée's daughter-in-law, who later helped turn the pink ribbon into the symbol of breast cancer awareness.
Q 10Which drugstore makeup brand made the slogan 'Easy, Breezy, Beautiful' famous?
CoverGirl
CoverGirl was launched in 1961 by the makers of Noxzema skin cream. Its advertising put the makeup on real cover girls, models from the covers of women's magazines.
Q 11Which London cosmetics house gave its name to the word for mascara in Spanish, Portuguese and Turkish?
Rimmel
Rimmel dates from 1834, when the Rimmel family set up as perfumers in London. Eugène Rimmel's dark 'cosmetique', often described as an early mascara, carried the family name into other languages.
Q 12Maybelline takes its name from whom?
The founder's sister Mabel
He saw Mabel darkening her lashes with Vaseline and coal dust and named his 1915 eye beautifier after her.
Q 13Which beauty brand did Emily Weiss launch in 2014 on the back of her popular beauty blog?
Glossier
Glossier grew out of Into the Gloss, the blog Emily Weiss started while she was working at Vogue, and began by selling online only.
Q 21What device did the Max Factor company build in 1939 to test a lipstick's resistance to fading?
A kissing machine
A kissing machine was built to prove that Tru-Color, developed under Max Factor Jr. as a smear-proof lipstick, really was as indelible as its advertising promised.
Q 22Which consumer-goods giant bought Max Factor from Revlon in 1991?
Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble kept Max Factor until a deal agreed in 2015 passed it, along with dozens of its other beauty brands, to Coty.
Q 23Revlon was founded in New York in 1932 to sell which single product?
Nail enamel
Nail enamel made with pigments instead of dyes gave Revlon opaque shades its rivals lacked. For years the firm was formally the Revlon Nail Enamel Corporation.
Q 14Which British makeup artist was made a dame in the 2021 New Year Honours?
Pat McGrath
Pat McGrath was honoured for services to fashion and beauty and, the citation added, to diversity. She had launched her own line, Pat McGrath Labs, in 2015.
Q 15Which cosmetics pioneer, born in Kraków, opened her first salon in Melbourne?
Helena Rubinstein
Helena Rubinstein reached Australia in 1896 and was waiting tables in Melbourne before she began selling her face cream, Valaze. Salons in London, Paris and New York followed.
Q 16Which beauty pioneer, born Florence Nightingale Graham in Canada, opened her first Fifth Avenue salon in 1910?
Elizabeth Arden
Elizabeth Arden kept 'Elizabeth' from a former partner's name, already lettered on the salon, to save on a new sign. The surname is usually said to come from Tennyson's poem Enoch Arden.
Q 17The stable of the founder of the Red Door salons won which race in 1947 with Jet Pilot?
The Kentucky Derby
The Kentucky Derby went to Jet Pilot, who led from the start. His owner raced as Maine Chance Farm, a name she took from her health and beauty spa in Maine.
Q 18What was Estée Lauder's first fragrance, launched in 1953 as a bath oil that doubled as perfume?
Youth-Dew
Youth-Dew changed how scent was worn: instead of dabbing French perfume behind each ear, women poured it into the bath by the bottle. It put the young company firmly on its feet.
Q 19Max Factor arrived from Russia in 1904 and settled in which city, then hosting the World's Fair?
St. Louis
St. Louis was his first American home. He ran a barber's shop there before moving to Los Angeles in 1908, where the film studios became his customers; the tale that a partner robbed him at the fair is unconfirmed.
Q 20What was Max Factor's Pan-Cake, created for Technicolor film in the 1930s?
A foundation makeup
A foundation makeup in cake form, put on with a damp sponge, it went on sale to the public in 1938. Rivals copied it so widely that 'cake make-up' became a product class of its own.
Q 24Where does the 'L' in Revlon come from?
Chemist Charles Lachman
Chemist Charles Lachman went into partnership with the brothers Charles and Joseph Revson in 1932. To make the name, the founders swapped the S in Revson for his L.
Q 25Laneige, Innisfree and Etude are beauty brands from which country?
South Korea
South Korea's Amorepacific owns all three. Laneige only sounds French: the name was borrowed from 'la neige', snow, for a brand the Korean group launched in 1994.
Q 26Which budget makeup brand, founded in Los Angeles in 1999, is named after the Greek goddess of the night?
NYX
NYX was started by Toni Ko at 25 with a loan from her parents and a small range of eye and lip pencils. Fifteen years later she sold it for a reported $500 million.
Q 27Which company ranked as the world's largest cosmetics maker in 2024?
L'Oréal
L'Oréal began far from the makeup counter: the chemist Eugène Schueller founded it in 1909 to sell a hair dye he had formulated himself to the hairdressers of Paris.
Q 28MAC Cosmetics was founded in 1984 in which Canadian city?
Toronto
Toronto is where Frank Toskan and Frank Angelo first made the line for professionals. Toskan said the models then wanted it for their sisters and friends, and word of mouth did the rest.
Q 29Which drag queen became the face of MAC Cosmetics in 1994, raising money for its AIDS fund?
RuPaul
RuPaul appeared on billboards in full drag beside the line 'I am the MAC girl'. The fund is fed by MAC's Viva Glam lipsticks, whose entire sale price is given away.
Q 30The retailer Sephora is named after which biblical figure?
Zipporah, wife of Moses
Zipporah, wife of Moses, is called Séphora in French, and the chain is French: it traces its beginnings to a perfumery in Limoges in 1969.