
mostly by including a toxic dose of radium, as demonstrated by one of the energy drink's biggest fans, Ebenezer Byers. Interesting Engineering notes that Radithor, which was popular in the 1920s, put pep in your step.
#Wolfsbane uses skin#
Some factory workers even painted their teeth with it as a practical joke on their boyfriends, as the book The Radium Girls relates.īut while trace amounts of radiation surely leached into your skin from your glowing complexion cream, an even better way to poison yourself with style was by chugging radioactive energy drinks. But skin creams and watch dials were only the beginning - radium was slathered on to pretty much anything. Eventually, your kidneys shut down, and you die, leaving a very attractive and already pale corpse.ĬNN points out that a whole host of bathroom products were infused with radioactive chemicals well into the 1960s, when we really should have known better. Unfortunately, long-term lead exposure leads to abdominal pain, irritability and fatigue, memory loss, vomiting, numbness and tingling in the hands and feet, and maybe a seizure or two. Later on, lead makeup would become the hallmark of the rich and famous - even Queen Elizabeth wore it to look attractively pale and probably also to cover up facial scarring, as National Geographic points out. In The Classical World, scholar Kelly Olson notes that ingredients like lead, vinegar, and animal fat were relatively cheap and plentiful in ancient times, so even poorer women could afford to smear themselves with lead makeup.



So naturally, everyone wanted to fake it - and since lead makes a lovely, opaque white pigment, as Natural Pigments notes, it became the first foundation and concealer as early as 400 BCE. As History of Cosmetics notes, the ancient Romans considered smooth, white skin to be a sign of high status and wealth.
