The Backstory: Looking good at any price

We’ll do anything to look fabulous these days—Ozempic, Botox, plastic surgery—but we have nothing on our ancestors. Sounds unpleasant, but they used face creams made from animal and human pee. They glued animal pelts on surprising body parts. And they literally poisoned themselves in their quest for perfect skin and hair. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
There are a million different resolutions we make as the
new year gets underway, and a lot of us, really,
I mean really want to look more fabulous than we
did last year or the year before. Right. How about
doing what our ancestors did and slathering your face and
hair with everything from ostrich eggs to pea to crocodile dung,

(00:20):
or fixing overplucked eyebrows by gluing on mouse pelts. It's
all about looking good at any price. I'm Fatty Steele
suffering for beauty in the new year. Next on the backstory,
We're back with the backstory. Resolutions are top of mind

(00:41):
as the new year unfolds. We want to be more successful,
more at peace, happier, and definitely better looking. I mean,
who doesn't want to look good now? It's all about
shots like Ozembek and Manjuro to make the weight fall off.
There's plenty of plastic surgery, laser treatments, and trips to
the medspot, botox and fillers. So I thought we would

(01:03):
revisit our earlier backstory about suffering for beauty. First, we'll
go back more than ten thousand years to ancient Egypt.
Men and women were anxious to hang on to youth
by protecting their skin. They used creams, oils, and makeup
made with herbs, spices, flowers, and other less savory ingredients

(01:24):
to look better. There was a primitive sunscreen made with
ostrich eggs, and for noble women there was nothing like
a milk bath, although Cleopatra later on parently preferred to
lounge in a bath of sour milk, and who doesn't
want a facial Aloe and spices were mixed with honey
and milk for an anti wrinkle and anti inflammatory mask

(01:46):
and makeup was essential to women and men. Lead, copper
and semi precious stones were ground up for eyeshadow. Their
dark almond shaped eyeliner was made from burnt almonds, animal fat,
and again deadly lead. Her lipstick, nail polish and blush
they used animal blood and clay. Moving to the Greek

(02:06):
and Roman empires, Plautus, a Roman philosopher, commented, a woman
without paint is like food without salt. Wow. Now they
learned a lot from the Egyptians later on, but the
Romans had some interesting beauty rituals of their own. In fact,
the word cosmetics comes from the Latin word cosmetae. They
were slave beautician slash stylists. The cosmetae would apply makeup

(02:30):
and jewelry, and even pluck hairs from their employer's body, legs, arms, face,
all over, hair on any part of the body, but
the head was not appreciated. Then. Many people even had
their entire head plucked, and men and women would shave
their faces in private parts with super sharp stones. The

(02:50):
cosmetae would slather their employer with exfolians and creams and
anti aging facial masks that tighten the skin and reduced wrinkles.
Actually spent full days at the spa, wrapping up with
a mud bath and a massage with fragrant oils, which
left them radiant and younger looking, or at least feeling
They looked younger, and it didn't stop there. Fair skin

(03:13):
was a sign of aristocracy, while a tan made you
look lower class, So to lighten their skin they used
a powder made of lead and chalk mixed with crocodile
dung ah. The price of beauty. Funny enough, despite the
distance apart, beauty regimens in Asia weren't a whole lot

(03:35):
different in ancient China as well. Pale complexions were a
sign of nobility, women would shave off their eyebrows before
bleaching their skin with a gel made from mushrooms, lead
and rice. Fast forward to Europe in the Middle Ages,
and once again, lead powder, alabaster, and egg whites were
used to hide freckles, smallpox, scars, and other blemishes and

(03:57):
create that pale white look. Miss It was a short
term fix, but long term it slowly poisoned them, turning
hair gray, drying out skin, giving them extreme stomach paint.
Sometimes it killed them worse. Yet, often this stuff just
didn't work, so some opted for an even weirder skin
whitening treatment. Leeches, getting rid of the blood flow in

(04:20):
their faces, gave them the gaunt, pale look both men
and women found irresistible, so they put the leeches around
their ears. Now there were other beauty challenges as well.
After trends changed. Women in the Middle Ages had to
deal with overplucked eyebrows, so they would glue mouse skins
on their brows, dyeing the mini brow wigs to match

(04:41):
their hair. You may have noticed in paintings of the
sixteenth and seventeenth century big shots that they had really
high hairlines, like back to the crown of their heads.
That was hugely in vogue, and some folks plucked every
hair as it grew in at the desired hairline. Others,
like Queen Elizabeth I, used cat pee or dong walnut
oil and vinegar as well as quicklime to remove unwanted hair.

(05:04):
It was also popularly used on the nether regions. Now
the problem is it sometimes removes skin as well. Actually,
pea of all sorts was a beauty thing in the
Middle East. To make their hair glossy, folks rinsed it
in camel pea and in venice. During the sixteen hundreds,
women looking to bleach their hair would soak it in
lion pea and lay in the sun for hours, using

(05:26):
a Venetian hat which had the top cut out so
only the hair was in the sun. Finally, some folks
men and women looking to go blonde would mix human
breast milk with saffron, so much for sweet smelling hair. Now,
by the Renaissance things changed a bit. They still use
lead powders to look pale, but they also believed the
hands of a woman could only be beautiful if they

(05:47):
were long lined with tiny, light colored veins, so women
would use blue paint and apply thin cosmetic veins to hands,
but also to their forehead and breasts. They'd coat that
with egg whites so they looked like they'd literally turned
to marble. If you had skin problems from all of this,
they recommended treating it with blood from healthy, red headed

(06:08):
men no older than twenty five. At the end of
the day, the overuse of lead could leave holes in
your face, so you'd either apply more lead makeup to
fill it in, or use the popular seventeenth century beauty
trick of gluing patches of star shaped fabric to the
holes in your face. Finally, when a white in your teeth,
they used marble glass crushed pearls mixed with honey. Eventually

(06:30):
your tooth enamel would wear off. But there's good news.
During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, it was fashionable to
paint your teeth black, mimicking tooth decay, meaning you could
afford sweets, plus it covered up the enamel loss. Eighteenth
century beauty was different from country to country. In France,
both men and women wore elaborate makeup with very white

(06:54):
lead based pastes on their faces, as well as deep red,
precise circles over the cheekbone, and hairstyles were nuts, Curly
powdered wigs were in Women had ribbons, jewels, flowers, feathers,
even model ships or hair lacquered into ships, as well
as bird cages, sometimes with actual birds in them. These
hairdows were massive, often three times the height of the head,

(07:17):
and worn for weeks at a time, which allowed mice
to build nests deep inside the dew while they slept
across the pond. In America during the colonial era, it
was all about conservative choices, no makeup or elaborate bathing.
In fact, it was a common belief that exposing your
skin to a lot of water could be fatal because
the water would seep into your skin and drown you

(07:40):
from the inside. Once we hit the nineteenth century, both
in America and Europe, fashionable women wanted slimmer figures because
they believed it made them look intelligent and refined. Also
popular flushed cheeks, bright eyes, and red lips. Now, all
those qualities were also signs of tuberculosis, or consumption as
they call it then, and that was fine because consumption

(08:03):
was thought to be an illness of aristocratic women. Okay,
we're amazed by all of this, But you know what,
these folks weren't so different from us. We inject botox,
we alter our bodies with plastic surgery, implants, piercings, tattoos,
and insane diets. So it seems most of us reflect
the trends during whatever time we live because of our

(08:25):
desire to be what we think is our very best self.
I'm Patty Steel. The Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premier Networks,
the Elvis Duran Group, and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer

(08:48):
is Doug Fraser. Our writer Jake Kushner. We have new
episodes every Tuesday and Friday. Feel free to reach out
to me with comments and even story suggestions on Instagram
at Real Patty Steel and on Facebook at Patty Steele.
Thanks for listening to the back Story with Patty Steele,
the pieces of history you didn't know you needed to know.