In reading something the other day about Elizabeth I, I came across the following on the use of various odd and hazardous compounds to enhance womanly beauty:
"[Elizabeth] whitened her skin by applying powder made of ground alabaster. She also used lotions consisting of beeswax, ass's milk, and even the ground jawbones of hogs. It is likely that she took even more drastic whitening measures, which included application of a substance compounded of white lead and vinegar and another mixture consisting of borax and sulfur. To redden her lips in pleasing contrast to the artificial pallor of her complexion, she may have used a popular concoction of red ocher and red crystalline mercuric sulfide, as well as cochineal, a red dye made from the ground-up bodies of the scaly red cochineal insect....Renaissance women routinely bleached freckles and other "blemishes" with a mixture of birch tree sap, ground brimstone (sulfur), oil of turpentine, and sublimate of mercury. In time such preparations left the skin almost in a state of mummification."
None for me, thanks.
(I thought I'd given up commenting on the vagaries of Ænigma, but for ocher the mad beast proposed Oconomowoc! 'Zlids!)
