Modern fashion trends can be... weird. I mean, skinny jeans can get a little uncomfortable,
yes. And maybe you have a friend who spends more
time waxing his mustache and trimming his beard than he does actually bathing himself. But your fashion choices probably won’t
kill, burn, or poison you. However, people haven't always been so lucky. Historically, some pretty dangerous clothing,
cosmetics, and accessories have come in vogue, endangering their wearers and makers alike. It turns out there are just some things that
you really don’t want to put on or in your body… even if everyone else is doing it. [INTRO] Let’s start in the 1700s, when skirts were
huge, cool guys wore wigs, and the hottest color in Europe was green. Specifically, two special pigments known as
Scheele’s Green and Emerald Green. In 1775, Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele
developed copper arsenate, an intense, yellow-green pigment that was more brilliant and longer-lasting
than any other green dye. It was also a lot more toxic because it was
made with arsenic. German scientists soon improved on Scheele’s
recipe by inventing an even more vivid green dye -- copper acetoarsenite, commonly known
as Emerald Green or Paris Green. And society loved it. They used it to decorate everything from fake
plants to ball gowns. For fashionistas, the danger emerged when
they’d sweat through their green gloves, stockings, or socks, and transfer the toxins
to their skin. This caused chemical burns and open sores
that absorbed even more of the poison. A poisonous dust would also flake off of dyed
objects, especially wallpapers or twirling dresses as people danced at balls. If you breathed in enough arsenic, the poisoning
could cause vomiting, ulcers, nerve damage, and eventually even death. But arsenic pigments weren’t the only harmful
ones. Some of the first synthetic dyes for clothes
and shoes could cause some pretty nasty health problems all on their own. Aniline is a toxic organic compound that was
first isolated from the indigo plant in the 1820s. When ingested, it interferes with blood cells’
ability to carry oxygen. But in 1856, a chemistry student named William
Henry Perkin was trying to use aniline to create an antimalarial drug, when he accidentally
created mauveine, a bright purple dye. And soon, aniline dyes were all the rage. Their vibrant reds and deep blacks made natural
dyes look muted by comparison. But I bet you can guess what happened next. People who wore socks, gloves, and shirts
colored with aniline, or shoes that had been shined with an aniline-based polish, often
suffered inflammatory skin reactions or headaches and dizziness… because the dye was poisoning
their blood. Our next dangerous trend is more like a single
horrible incident. The culprit in this case was zinc chloride,
which wasn’t used to dye fabrics, but it was used in a coating that goes on wool to
protect the fabric. The compound had, and still has, lots of applications,
because it’s both highly corrosive and highly soluble in water. But, one day, in December 1898, over 60 men
were hired to clean the streets of Birmingham, England after a snowstorm. And they were all given new wool overcoats
to keep them warm. Nice, right? Well, most of the men ended up in the hospital,
with large patches of destroyed skin around their knees and wrists. It turns out, their coats had been treated
with an excess of zinc chloride, and when they got wet from the snow, the toxin dripped
onto their skin and caused serious chemical burns. Now, we’ve talked before about how asbestos
has been misused over the ages. But before anyone knew that asbestos equals
dying, it was often worn for protection. It can form lightweight fibers that can be
woven into fabric, and it's famously flame retardant. So, from ancient Rome until at least the early
1980s, lots of dangerous, fire-related jobs involved wearing uniforms with some amount
of asbestos in them. This was especially true for firefighters. But, asbestos fibers are incredibly dangerous
for human health. Even when they’re woven into clothing, asbestos
fibers can break off into tiny pieces that can enter the lungs. When too many fibers build up in your lungs,
they cause irritation, inflammation, and scarring, hindering the ability to absorb oxygen and
making it hard to breathe. Asbestos is also a carcinogen. People who are exposed to large amounts of
it tend to develop an otherwise-rare lung cancer called mesothelioma. So even though we were using it as protection,
asbestos was doing tremendous damage to our bodies all along. Another fabric that proved to be more harmful
than we expected is viscose rayon. In the late 1800s, chemists were looking for
an artificial substitute for natural silk, which, as sexy as it is, is incredibly time-consuming
and expensive to produce. In 1905, a British company began making a
new material: They started with a sticky solution of dissolved wood pulp, which contains lots
of the natural plant polymer cellulose. They aged it, dumped in some chemicals, and
eventually extracted fibers that looked and felt a lot like silk. We know those fibers today as rayon. One of the key steps in making viscose rayon
involved a compound called carbon disulfide, which is -- as you might guess-- highly toxic! The fabric was safe to wear, but factory workers
suffered. Prolonged exposure to carbon disulfide can
damage the cardiovascular and nervous systems. This was linked to behavioral and health problems
among workers ranging from bouts of mania to strokes. But even with these hazards, the popularity
of artificial silk kept booming, well into the 1900s. So you might know the Mad Hatter from Lewis
Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland -- kind of crazy, drinks a lot of tea? Turns out, he might have some basis in reality. The phrase “mad as a hatter” was actually
used to describe industrial hat-makers in the mid-1800s, who were poisoned by mercury
just by doing their jobs. Most hats were felted, or made from the fur
of small animals. And to make felt, hatters used a process called
“carroting,” where they washed the pelts in an orange solution containing mercury nitrate
to separate the fur from the skin and shrink it into a thin mat. But the price they paid for dapper hats was
mercury poisoning, which drastically harmed hatters’ central nervous systems. Mercurial disease, or Mad Hatter Disease,
causes extreme emotional states plus physical effects, like tremors and difficulty walking,
speaking, and writing. Since these hats didn’t poison the general
public, the occupational hazards of being a hatter persisted. It took half a century or longer for countries
to start banning the use of mercury in the felt hat industry. But what about cosmetics? One fashion trend that emerged in the 1500s
was an obsession with blindingly white skin. In 16th and 17th-century England, women painted
their faces with a whitening paste called Venetian ceruse. The pigment was made by mixing metallic lead
with acetic acid -- also known as vinegar -- in the presence of carbon dioxide to make
lead carbonate, a powdery white lead. This gave the illusion of a snow-white face,
but over time, it would eat away at people’s skin and caused scarring, headaches, nausea,
muscle damage, baldness, and eventually early death. In 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie famously discovered
radium, in the form of radium chloride, by extracting it from the radioactive mineral
called uraninite, or pitchblende. After a couple decades of work, in 1910, they
were able to isolate radium as a pure metal. And this discovery not only thrilled scientific
researchers, but it also caused a wave of “science-based” consumer goods to sweep
the world. We are talking... radium makeup! For example, the London-based Radior in 1917
used radium in products like face creams, soaps, powders, and blush. In the 1930s, ladies in Paris could wear Tho-Radia
brand cosmetics, made from both thorium chloride and radium bromide -- apparently, the more
radioactive elements, the better. Thankfully, most of these products contained
such low amounts of radium that they were pretty much harmless -- although it’s possible
that customers suffered health effects later in life. Instead, the most serious poisoning cases
were in the factories where radium products were made. Especially in the “Radium Girls,” a group
of about 4,000 factory workers in the United States who painted watch faces with glowing
paint and were pretty much bathed in radioactive dust every day. By the 1920s, they began to suffer from anemia,
“radium jaw” and bone cancers. Within about 20 years, largely because of
their plight, radium-branded products had all but disappeared from the market. And people weren’t just putting toxins on
their face for the sake of beauty. They also put poison in their eyes to look
more attractive. The poison in question here is atropine, a
compound derived from a poisonous plant called Deadly Nightshade, or Atropa belladonna. “Belladonna” means “beautiful lady”
in Italian, and it stems from a dangerous beauty practice. In some ancient cultures, women were said
to put drops of juice from Deadly Nightshade berries in their eyes to dilate, or enlarge,
their pupils for that striking doe-eyed look. Atropine is a smooth muscle relaxant, and
your irises are full of smooth muscles that expand and contract to let in different amounts
of light. By adding atropine to your eye, you’re stopping
your iris from being able to respond to light. Putting lots of atropine in your eyes is a
pretty horrible idea, because constantly dilated eyes can expose your retinas to too much light,
damaging the sensory tissues and affecting your vision. Plus, forcing your eye muscles into unnatural
positions has been found to affect your internal eye pressure and damage your optic nerve,
which could lead to blindness. Today, doctors still use atropine for its
muscle relaxing and anesthetic effects, mainly to dilate your pupils before eye exams. They just use it in very small, controlled
doses. Finally, let’s go out with a bang with combustible
fashion accessories! Celluloid was the most successful early, synthetic
plastic. It was cheap, light, strong, easily molded
to whatever shape you wanted. So in the late 1800s and early 1900s, celluloid
accessories were everywhere -- buttons, jewelry, eyeglass frames, toys, and little hair combs
that ladies would wear. But, what people didn’t realize was that
celluloid was manufactured using a compound called cellulose nitrate. Now, cellulose is that naturally-occurring
plant polymer I mentioned earlier. And when you expose cellulose, like in wood
pulp or cotton, to nitric acid, it forms cellulose nitrate -- which is highly flammable. So flammable that it’s also called guncotton
because of its tendency to … explode. So with the rise in popularity of celluloid
accessories came a wave of newspaper articles about combs combusting in people’s hair,
setting their whole body on fire, just from the heat from a curling iron or a nearby electric
lamp. There were even reports of entire stores burning
down because they stored their celluloid stuff too close to windows and mirrors on hot summer
days. So, in comparison, those skinny jeans and
mustache waxes don’t seem so bad now, do they? All told, it’s much safer to commit a fashion
faux-pas than have your skin burned or your hair catch on fire, all because of a trend. Thanks for watching this SciShow List Show,
and thanks especially to all of our patrons on Patreon who make this show possible. If you want to help us make videos like this,
just go to patreon.com/scishow. And don’t forget to go to youtube.com/scishow
and subscribe! When you look at a plant, your first thought
probably is not "That thing's gonna kill me!" But in some cases, that thing is gonna kill
you. Sure, plants can be pretty or delicious, but
they also evolved with all kinds of compounds inside...
