Today, we gladly submit our bodies and skin to all manner of strange treatments, all in the name of beauty. We inject the botulinum toxin to smooth out wrinkles, lie in carcinogen-laden UVB tanning beds to get that perfect bronze and rip our hair out with hot wax. But that's nothing compared to what women did for beauty back in the day. For example, to remove unwanted hair during the Renaissance, women used quicklime...aka that stuff the mob uses to dissolve bodies! So while losing the leg hair, ladies also said sayonara to their skin. It's hard to believe, but being pale has been all the rage throughout history - until this century. And women did everything they could to make their skin a lovely white hue, including eating chalk, drinking iodine and using leeches to suck the blood out of their faces. And to make that hue luminous, they might have used mercury to give their faces a shine, or a tincture of vinegar and lead, called ceruse foundation.
Both of these concoctions were highly toxic! And for the eyes, Victorian women used a belladonna - a highly poisonous herb -- mixture to brighten their eyes. For sparse eyebrows, they simply adhered small sections of mouse fur. A product called Lash Lure, a precursor to mascara, was so lethal that it spurred Congress to pass the 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, allowing the FDA to regulate cosmetics. Women who needed to dispose of their husbands could invest in Aqua Tofana back in the 1700s. It was a product that mixed arsenic, lead and possibly belladonna to make a lethal concoction that murderous women could apply to their cheeks. When their lovers moved in for a peck, just a bit of the mix on the lips would kill them. It's a good thing it's not sold these days...