Centuries ago, upper crust women were as devoted to their beauty treatments as women are today. The ingredients have changed, however. For flawless-looking skin, Renaissance noblewomen wore makeup containing white lead ore, vinegar, arsenic, hydroxide, and carbonate, applied to the face over egg whites. It gave them a silvery gleaming complexion, along with paralysis, madness, and death. They also used mercury foundation, topped off with a liberal dusting of arsenic face powder.
It’s possible that Queen Elizabeth I, who used cosmetics containing arsenic, mercury, and lead for over 40 years, suffered from heavy metal poisoning. During the last years of her life, the queen lost her appetite and deteriorated mentally and physically. She routinely erupted into temper tantrums with her ladies-in-waiting and sometimes threw cosmetics and brushes at them. The queen’s godson, Sir John Harington, noticed that she “doth not now bear with such composed spirit as she was wont; but…seemeth more forward than commonly she used to bear herself towards her women.”
While she had always taken sensible measures to ensure her personal safety—as all monarchs did—by the 1590s she developed a strong streak of paranoia. The Jesuits, she said, were trying to assassinate her. Sir John Harington noted, “She walks much in her privy chamber, and stamps with her feet at ill news, and thrusts her rusty sword at times into the arras [tapestry] in great rage.”
She became increasingly lonely and depressed as her old friends passed away. The heaviest blow came in 1601 when her young admirer, Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, was executed for treason. Giovanni Scaramelli, the Venetian ambassador, reported, “She has so suddenly withdrawn into herself, she who was wont to live so gaily, especially in these last years of her life. Her days seemed numerous indeed but not now she allows grief to overcome her strength.” In her remaining two years, the queen often sat in the dark, weeping. Elizabeth Tudor, the cunning, energetic politician, had become indecisive and querulous, and seemed to be losing her grip on power.
The people around her thought she was just getting old. And though she died at 69—considered quite old at the time—perhaps her deadly cosmetics hastened her death.
It is almost certain that a beauty treatment killed a sixteenth-century French royal mistress, Diane de Poitiers, who drank a potion of liquid gold every day.
The lovely strawberry blonde woman was desperate to look younger, since she was 19 years older than her royal lover, King Henri II, and went to extreme measures to retain her youthful appearance. When French researchers discovered her remains in 2008, they found that her corpse had so much gold in it that it had leached out into the ground around the body. It also had dangerously high mercury levels, which must have come from her cosmetics and medications. Such high levels of toxicity would have damaged her kidneys, caused neurological disease, caused weak bones that broke easily, and inflamed her large and small intestines. In short, it is probably what killed her.
A recipe for potable gold in a sixteenth century book advised that it should be drunk once a month. But according to a writer who visited Diane, she drank it daily. The deadly potion did, at least, provide her with the ghastly white skin she wanted. She had severe anemia caused by the reduced production of red blood cells.
Other Renaissance beauty treatments were either harmful or just plain gross. For instance, to obtain a fresh complexion, a woman washed her face in the urine of humans or animals.
A popular sixteenth-century face mask was made of mercury and turpentine, left on the skin for eight days, and rubbed off with steam and bread. To dry up pimples, people slathered on ox dung. They filled in smallpox scars with human fat, which they obtained from the town executioner. For soft, white hands, women thrust them into the pulsating entrails of a just-killed animal. Hot blood, they thought, was the best kind of hand cream.
To whiten teeth, courtiers ground up grain, pumice stone, aloe, vinegar, honey, cinnamon, pearls, scrapings of ivory, quinces, and walnuts and cooked it with silver or gold foil. They rubbed the paste over their teeth with a cloth. Of course, silver and gold foil are poisonous, and the abrasive powder, in taking away the stains, also removed tooth enamel!
In the Elizabethan era, most Englishwomen imitated their queen, and so red hair was the height of fashion. Court ladies used a powder made of sulfur and safflower petals to color their wigs. Unfortunately, the sulfur was highly toxic and caused headaches, nausea, and nosebleeds.
For those hoping to toss aside their nosebleed wigs, there were recipes to dye hair reddish-blond. The sixteenth-century author Maister Alexis provided us with one that included red vitriol, rock alum, antimony, and saltpeter, ingredients “which comforteth the braine and memorie.” The result, he wrote, was “faire haire and glistering like gold.”
However, the good maister added ominously, “But remember to use in all things a discretion and diligence at the first when you use any receipte, as for an example on this confection, you must take heed that the lie be not too strong, least that the said ointment (which I tell you is very strong) eate and consume your hair.”
Indeed, we are left to ponder if the lady using this recipe of antimony, lye, red vitriol, rock alum, and saltpeter, all of which have toxic qualities, was deeply disappointed, and not just by illness and death. Quite possibly, instead of glistering hair, she had none at all.
Throughout time, women have wanted luxuriant thick tresses, though the means of obtaining them have certainly changed. The 1675 Accomplish’d Ladys Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery recommended “ashes of Goats-dung mingled with oyl” to anoint the head. Men combating baldness mixed rat droppings with honey and onion juice and rubbed it on their bald spots.
For covering gray hair, the 1561 Italian bestseller, The Secrets of Signora Isabella Cortese, written by a female alchemist, recommended, “Take four or five spoons of quicklime in powder, two pennyworth of lead oxide with gold and two with silver, and put everything in a mortar and grind it in ordinary water; set it to boil as long as you would cook a pennyworth of cabbage; remove it from the fire and let it cool until tepid. And then wash your hair with it.”
Maister Alexis recommended a toxic dye “for to make a mans beard blacke. Take aqua fortis [nitric acid] and a pennye weight of fine silver and melt it in the water by the fire and anoint the beard.”
Arsenic and Old Lice
In centuries past, lice were a perennial problem from the filthiest hovel to the most magnificent palace. In his book, A Treatise on the Diseases of Children, the seventeenth-century English physician, Robert Pemell, recommended applying to the scalp a mixture of arsenic, quicksilver, and white hellebore (a deadly flower), or combing the hair with strong mercury water and arsenic.
The sixteenth-century French royal physician Ambroise Paré advised lousy people to anoint their heads with a mixture of quick-silver and butter. For body lice, fleas, and bedbugs, he recommended the patient wear a cloth strip smeared with mercury and hogs’ grease directly on the skin at the waist like a belt. The mercury would have poisoned the insects, and the grease would have smothered them, though the rank odor of the strip would not have endeared its wearer to those downwind.
Arsenic was used not only to remove lice from hairy body parts, but also to remove the hair itself. We can assume that moustaches and chin hair have plagued the fairer sex ever since they cooked up mastodon meat in caves. While in centuries past, a lady’s arms and legs were always covered by heavy material (except in the boudoir) some women still liked smooth legs and underarms.
Master Alexis provided us with several depilatory recipes. One of them, “An Ointment to make the Hairs fall from any Place of the Body”, calls for mixing eight egg yolks, an ounce of arsenic sulfide, egg whites, and lye. “Anoint the place from the which you will have the haires to fall,” Maister Alexis instructed, “and leave the ointment so upon it the space of a quarter of an hour or a little more: then wash the place with warme water, and all the haire will fall off.” As well as some of the skin, we must assume.
He saves his most important instructions for last. “You must note that the haire will not fall awaie, but when the Moone decreaseth, that is to saie, in the quarter of the wane.”
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