November 17, 1558 Strange Beauty Secrets

Popular ideas of what is beautiful have changed with time and place, but strange beauty secrets are as old as history itself.

In ancient Greece, blond hair was perceived as beautiful, probably because it was unusual. Women would lighten their hair using a mixture of ashes, olive oil & water, and sometimes arsenic.

Cleopatra used a lipstick of mashed up beetle guts and powdered her eyes with the dried excrement, of crocodiles.  She would bathe daily in the sour milk of donkeys, 700 of the animals kept on-hand, for the purpose.

The stuff was supposed to have smoothed out wrinkles and just might have worked too.  Soured lactose turns to lactic acid, capable of removing the top layer of skin.  The Greek princess-turned Egyptian Pharoah all but owned the hearts of the most powerful men of the age, but at a cost.  Burning your own skin off seems a tough…