The Dressing Table: A Brief Visual History, from Apothecary to Vanity Station

There is a piece of furniture that does not get the same attention as the sofa or the bed — but it has, quietly, for three hundred years, done more work on the way a woman perceives her own face than the mirror itself. The dressing table is not merely the surface on which a woman applies her face. It is the architecture of the morning.

The piece has a history, and the history is the reason a beauty magazine called Lacquered should care about it.

The apothecary cabinet, circa 1700

The earliest ancestor of the modern dressing table is the apothecary cabinet — a vertical, often wall-mounted, set of shallow drawers behind a hinged or sliding door, used by pharmacists to organise the small bottles, packets, and powders of their trade. The apothecary was the original custodian of substances applied to the body — the original keeper of the small.

A woman’s toilet, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was a similar problem of small storage. Patches, pomades, rouges, powders, combs, scissors, small scissors, smaller scissors — the lady’s dressing required an architecture of compartments. By the early 1700s, the apothecary cabinet had been domesticated. Pulled from the pharmacy and into the bedchamber, it was refitted in walnut, mahogany, or rosewood, lined with velvet, and set on a small standing table.

The piece that emerged is what we now call a vanity. The word is French. The object, in its earliest form, was not.

The coiffeuse, circa 1750

In the middle of the eighteenth century, French ébénistes began producing a piece of furniture the French called a coiffeuse — literally, “she who does hair”, but also, by synecdoche, the table at which a woman did her hair. The coiffeuse was a small writing-table-like piece, with a hinged top that opened to reveal a fitted interior: a mirror in the lid, small compartments, sometimes a velvet-lined slide for jewellery.

The aesthetic was consistent across the workshops. The wood was veneered in mahogany, tulipwood, or kingwood. The ormolu mounts were gilt, often with floral or musical motifs. The handles were delicately chased. The proportions were slightly smaller than a desk — the coiffeuse was a piece for a woman’s body, not for correspondence.

It was also, often, lacquered. The word vernis in French referred both to the clear varnish applied to a piece of furniture and to the lacquer work imported from East Asia. By the late eighteenth century, vernis Martin — the pale, semi-opaque lacquer developed by the Martin brothers in Paris — was being applied to coiffeuses, secretaire cabinets, and small tables across the French court. The result was a piece of furniture that looked, in a certain light, almost Japanese.

This is the period when the lacquered dressing table — as a piece of cultural furniture — first becomes legible. Not as a Japanese piece brought to Europe (which was a separate, simultaneous phenomenon) but as a French piece finished in a French technique named after a French medium. The dressing table, by the late 1700s, was something a woman lacquered.

The Victorian dressing table, 1850–1900

By the Victorian period, the dressing table had become its own category. It was no longer a cabinet or a coiffeuse; it was a specific piece of bedroom furniture, usually consisting of a low, wide table with a separate or attached mirror, sometimes with drawers on either side and a central kneeling-space.

The Victorian dressing table was almost always covered in a cloth — a toilet cover — typically white or cream damask, often embroidered. The cover was functional (it caught powder) but also symbolic: the dressing table, in this period, was a place that was hidden during the day. It was the site of the morning’s unguarded work, and a cloth was the appropriate modesty.

The Victorian piece is, visually, the furthest the dressing table has ever been from the lacquered surface. The wood was usually dark and heavy; the cloth covered almost all of it; the mirror was, frequently, the only visible surface. This is the period in which the dressing table was, essentially, a table-cloth on legs.

The twentieth-century vanity, 1920–1960

Two things changed the dressing table in the twentieth century. The first was electric light, which made the morning mirror an even more specific work site. The second was Hollywood, which made the dressing table a public image. The black-and-white Hollywood dressing table of the 1930s — a wide, low, mirrored surface crowded with bottles, combs, and ashtrays — became the visual template for the dressing table, even in households that did not live like Hollywood.

The mid-century dressing table, particularly in the 1950s, was small, blonde or white-lacquered, and almost always tri-folded. The tri-fold mirror — three panels, the centre one fixed, the side panels adjustable — was the period’s most legible contribution to the form. It allowed a woman, sitting at the table, to see the back of her own head without standing up. The tri-fold mirror is, in retrospect, an architectural answer to a very specific problem: how do you put the back of your head in the same frame as the front?

The lacquered home vanity, 2020 onward

What we call a vanity in 2026 is, in most households, no longer a piece of furniture at all. It is a corner of a bedroom, a stretch of counter in a bathroom, the top of a small chest of drawers, or a tray that travels between rooms. The vanity station — a term that has appeared only in the last ten years — is, increasingly, a surface chosen, not a piece of furniture inherited.

Three things are true about the contemporary vanity:

It is lacquered. Whether the surface is a high-gloss painted wall, a lacquered tray, a black-glass bathroom counter, or a chipboard top finished in a single coat of alkyd enamel, the prevailing material is some form of lacquer. We have, in effect, returned to the French eighteenth-century preference for a glossy, reflective surface — but arrived there from a different direction.

It is private. The vanity is, increasingly, no longer a piece of bedroom furniture but a corner of a bathroom or dressing area, screened off or behind a door. The screen is functional (light, ventilation) but it is also a return to a certain modesty that the Victorian cloth was also a sign of.

It is portable. Many women we know keep a tray, a small box, or a set of drawers that they move between rooms — the vanity that travels. This is the smallest, most contemporary evolution of the form: the dressing table has become a kit.

What the surface does

The history of the dressing table is, mostly, a history of the surface. Whether the surface is an apothecary’s velvet, a coiffeuse’s ormolu, a Victorian damask, a Hollywood mirror, or a contemporary high-gloss enamel, the question the surface has had to answer, for three centuries, is the same: what does the small sit on?

The lacquered surface, in 2026, is the answer the form has settled on. It is a surface that does not catch powder, that wipes clean, that photographs well in the morning light, and that gives back, to the woman sitting at it, a small reflection of her own face before the day begins. It is the most useful surface the form has yet found.