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Patch box

Ceramics
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A small, decorative container for adhesive beauty patches; in poetry, it suggests 18th-century fashion, cosmetic artifice, and the preservation of delicate items in miniature ceramic form.

Detailed Definition
In the category of ceramics, patch boxes evoke vanity and 18th century fashion. Poets use for artifice.
Example
Example in poetry:
The patch box — a small, decorative box for holding the black fabric patches fashionable women applied to their faces in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — appears in poems about the elaborate artifice of the period; A poem about a Restoration lady's toilet might describe the patch box: "the patches in their tiny case — a star for the corner of the eye, a crescent for the cheekbone, the whole face composed as carefully as a sonnet"; Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" inhabits the world of the patch box: Belinda's dressing table is an altar of artificial beauty at which these objects are the sacred implements; In a poem about vanity and wit, the placement of a patch near the mouth was said to indicate a satirical disposition — the skin's political geography, readable by those who knew the code; The patch box's miniature scale and decorative exterior — enamel, gold, painted lids — make it a subject for poems about small, concentrated beauty; A verse about the end of a fashion might describe the patch box empty at last: "the patches gone, the fashion fled, the little case still faithful to an art that the new century found ridiculous."
Additional Notes
The patch box is a small, lidded container — often in porcelain, enamel on copper, or gold — used by fashionable women and men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to store the small black silk or velvet beauty patches worn on the face to highlight the skin's whiteness and to conceal blemishes. Porcelain patch boxes, particularly those made at Chelsea, Battersea (in enamel), and Dresden, were often exquisitely painted and bear witty or affectionate mottoes on their lids. In poetry of the period — from Pope's The Rape of the Lock onward — the patch box is a potent symbol of the vanity and artifice of fashionable society.
Also Known As
Patchbox
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