Beauty mark

Fashion prints from the late seventeenth century show women with an increasing number of beauty marks in a variety of sizes and shapes, placed on the cheeks, chins, and forehead.

The placement or shape of a patch could reveal information about then wearer's relationship status, sexual availability, or political affiliations.

Now awful Beauty puts on all its Arms; The Fair each moment rises in her Charms, Repairs her Smiles, awakens ev'ry Grace,

And calls forth all the Wonders of her Face;Moral commentators in the early modern period increasingly expressed concern about the wearing of beauty patches, and linked it to sexual immorality and prostitution.

The British diarist and intellectual John Evelyn referred to the wearing of patches, and make-up more general, as a "most ignominious thing.

In the conclusion of the book The Silence of the Lambs, the heroine Clarice Starling gains an artificial beauty mark when burnt gunpowder gets lodged in the flesh of her cheek.