What do the blue areas on a kabuki face mean — and is the blue around the mouth the same thing?

Look at a kabuki face and you notice blue areas over the white ground: sometimes across the upper forehead, sometimes around the mouth. Many take this for blue kumadori. It is in fact something else.

What the blue represents is the roots of shaved hair. Edo warriors and townsmen shaved the sakayaki — the hair from the forehead back over the crown. A freshly shaved scalp looks bluish, the roots showing through the skin. On stage, the actor's own hair is bound under a habutae silk cap, flesh tone is laid over it, and a blue pigment called seitai is worked into the area of the sakayaki to produce that shaved look. The blue around the mouth follows exactly the same logic: the trace of a shaved beard. It is not that the face is painted blue; it is that a shaved condition is being drawn.

How the blue is laid on therefore speaks of who a character is. Strong blue means a grown man with a heavy beard — masculinity, strength, and years. A young, gentle nimaime lead gets no such depth of blue, because his face would not carry a conspicuous shave. Without a line of dialogue about age, the blue alone says that this is a man of settled years. This is where kabuki makeup shows itself as a system of signs.

The two are easy to confuse, so let us separate them plainly. The ai-guma used for grand villains and vengeful spirits is kumadori: blue lines drawn along the muscles of the face, signifying what is not quite human. The blue described here is not a line but a ground laid across an area, and what it depicts is a real matter of grooming — a shave. The same pigment, wholly different offices. When you see blue on stage, ask whether it is a line or a field.