The Strange Beauty Secrets Of History's Most Beautiful Women

the strangest beauty secrets of history's most beautiful women number ten Empress Elizabeth a facemask lined with reveal the most beautiful woman on earth in the 19th century was Empress Elisabeth of Austria she was famous across Europe for her impeccable skin into thick chestnut hair that fell all the way down to her feet none of which came easy to keep her skin beautiful she would crush a strawberries over her hands face and neck bathe in warm olive oil and sleep in what has only been described as a mask line inside with raw veal it was the closest she came to eating food her favorite dish was pressed extract of chicken Partridge venison and beef which isn't so much of food as something you'd find in a spice cabinet and even then she'd wrap herself in a corset so tight that her waist only measured 49 point five centimeters around she spent three hours each day getting her hair down mainly because it was so long that it would get tied up in knots and when it was put up in ribbons her hair would get so heavy that it would give her headaches it meant that more often than not she was stuck indoors too afraid to let the wind ruin her hair but if you want to be beautiful sometimes you have to give up on little luxuries like ever leaving your house number 9 Cleopatra bathing in donkey milk queen Cleopatra won the hearts of the most powerful men alive maybe it was her grace maybe it was her charm or maybe it was that sweet aroma of dung and insect guts Cleopatra after all almost certainly followed the usual beauty conventions of her time and that meant wearing a lipstick made out of mashed up beetle guts and putting powdered crocodile down under her eyes but Cleopatra didn't limit herself to a peasant's beauty regimen she was a queen and that meant that she could afford the most luxurious treatment of all bathing in sour donkey milk her servants would milk 700 donkeys each day so that that they could fill a tub with their milk then once it had gone bad Cleopatra would bathe inside the theory was that it would reduce wrinkles and it may actually have worked soured lactose turns into lactic acid which can make the surface layer of skin on a woman's body peel off revealing the smoother blemish free skin underneath that was the real secret to her beauty burning her flesh off number eight Nefertiti wearing enough makeup to kill you the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti 's name meant the beautiful one has come and she lived up to it she was so beautiful that in the early 20th century a statue of her face caused an international sensation more than three thousand years after she died her looks were still front-page news and no wonder she put no small amount of work into looking good the Queen's of Nefertiti's time would be buried with their makeup and so while they didn't write many of their beauty secrets down we've been able to find their methods left behind in their tombs while her tomb has never been found the tombs of her contemporaries give us a pretty good idea of how she did it Nefertiti was completely hairless her entire body was shaved from head to toe with the razor including the hair on the top of her head instead she topped her head with a wig and painted her eyes black with something called coal ancient Egyptian coal incidentally was made out of the dark lead or Galena which means that Nefertiti was slowly killing herself with lead poisoning every time she put on makeup but it's highly unlikely that the lead killed her there's simply no way it could have finished her off before her lipstick her lipstick after all contained bromine maneet another toxic substance that it's generally believed would have poisoned her long before the lead she dabbed around her eyes number seven Queen Elizabeth the first coating your skin and lead poisoning herself with lead is no passing fad it's been a great look for thousands of years while Nefertiti may have dabbed a little lead around her eyes it was nothing compared to Queen Elizabeth the first during the Elizabethan era the most popular skin product was something called Venetians aru's which quite simply was a mixture of lead and vinegar that women would put all over their skin to make them look porcelain white nobody used more of it than Queen Elizabeth herself when she was 29 Elizabeth contracted smallpox and was left with scars all over her skin she was too humiliated to show her scars in public and so instead she covered every inch of her flesh with the toxic white paint Queen Elizabeth used so much of it that she was completely unrecognizable without it when one man the Earl of Essex accidentally peaked the sight of her without her makeup on he went around joking that she hidden a crooked carcass underneath that thick veneer of venetian ceruse number six Marie Antoinette stewed pigeon water the French Queen marie-antoinette didn't exactly let herself eat cake she had a reputation as a world-class beauty and she was determined to keep it up like Empress Elisabeth she would go to bed with a face mask but Antoinette's made of cognac eggs powdered milk and lemon sounds a little bit less like a beauty treatment and a little bit more like the catering menu at a birthday party she'd start the morning by washing her face with a facial cleanser made out of pigeons in those days that was a selling point the product came proudly labeled with the mean Oh cosmetic de pigeon and a little ad promising every bottle had been made with aide pigeon suit then she would get dressed for the first of three times each day as Queen of France Marie Antoinette was expected to never wear the same thing twice and so each year she would one hundred twenty thousand livres own clothes the equivalent to about four million dollars today she may even have indulged in the popular French fashion of tracing her veins with a blue pencil at the time the women of France wanted to be so thin that they were translucent so they draw the inner workings of their bodies trying to convince the men that they had transparent skin number five Mary Queen of Scots bathing in wine Mary Queen of Scots wasn't a natural beauty she was born with a nose a little large and a chin a little too sharp but she was a queen and she was determined to be beautiful to keep her skin as striking as possible she had her servants fill a bathtub with the white wine she would wait in it convinced that the wine was improving her complexion it sounds decadent but it's actually something people still do today today it's called vino therapy and there are places all around the world where you can experience the mary queen of scots treatment for yourself it's hard to say exactly what the Queen used but the modern vino therapists don't actually pour drinkable alcoholic wine instead they used the leftover compost from the winemaking process the pips and pulps of grapes that get left behind so no you can't get drunk off of it number four empress zoe porphyra Ginetta starting your own cosmetics lab empress zoe porphyra Ginetta was one of the most beautiful women in the byzantine empire she didn't just look good when she was young though even when she was well into her 60s it said she still looked like a twenty year old she certainly worked hard enough for it after becoming the Empress Zoe porphyra Jennifer had an entire laboratory dedicated to making her cosmetics built inside of the Imperial Palace it was a real cosmetic factory every bit as huge and expensive as the ones that supply whole countries had this one though Zoe was the only customer it was expensive but for the empress blowing a small fortune was just all in a day's work it said that she was the sort of woman who could exhaust a sea teeming with gold dust in one day but it's also said that like a well baked chicken every part of her was firm and in good condition this is definitive proof that it worked because clearly Zoey looked so good that the men who saw her were so smitten that they couldn't even form a sentence that didn't make your skin crawl number three Lucrezia Borgia spending multiple days washing your hair the poet Lord Byron once said that Lucrezia Borgias hair was the prettiest and fairest imaginable he wasn't just trying out a line for a new poem he was in love so much so in fact that he stole a strand of her hair and kept it by his bed it sounds one of those touching love stories that usually end with someone filing a restraining order Lucrezia though probably appreciated it she deserved a little recognition for the amount of work she put into that hair because she would spend days washing it Lucrezia's hair was bright and blonde but that wasn't nature everyone else in her family had dark hair Lucrezia though made sure her shined like the Sun by rinsing it in lye and lemon juice for hours then drying it out in the sunlight for the better part of a day it took so much time that she repeatedly canceled trips to wash her hair multiple letters from Lucrezia's attendants have survived to this day in them she politely apologizes to people and explains that she will be a few days late because she has to put her clothes in order and wash her head number 2 Helen of Troy bathing in vinegar Helen of Troy had the face that launched 1,000 chips she was a woman so beautiful that thousands of men died for her own or well either that or else she was just a figment of an old Greek guy's imagination if Homer really did make her up though he had a remarkable understanding of women's cosmetic care because packed deep in her legend is a beauty regimen that really works beep Ellen of Troy according to the Iliad would bathe in vinegar every day her attendants would prepare what technically speaking was bathtub full of acid and she would just dive right in today people tend to assume that she used apple cider vinegar or that she diluted it in water simply because otherwise it sounds pretty horrible after all that's something people still do today bathe in a mixture of apple cider vinegar and water and it actually works the vinegar balance is the Bonnies pH levels which can have a cleansing effect but there's nothing saying Helen of Troy ever added water she may just have dived right into a bathtub filled to the brim with white vinegar it would have hurt and she would have smelled but that's what it takes to look good enough to start a war number one serum Neda Vespucci arsenic leeches and human urine even if you don't know her name you've seen semen edifice coochies face she was the muse for some of the greatest painters of the Renaissance she was even chosen to model for the goddess of love herself at the center of the painting The Birth of Venus in the Renaissance everyone wanted to look like her and so they copied her beauty regimen leeches poisons and all to keep their skin pale white and beautiful the women invest poochie's time we'll attach leeches to their ears the leeches would drain the blood out of their faces leaving them deathly pale those who didn't want to go that far though could always use a face mask Renaissance women would mix breadcrumbs and egg whites with vinegar and then apply it liberally on their faces of beauty secret that conveniently doubles as a great recipe for fried chicken eyebrow hair at the time had to be plucked or ideally burned straight off women would remove their hairs with arsenic and rock alum and then send it all down with gold but that was nothing compared to what they do to get that long flowing golden mane of hair on her head for Vespucci it just came naturally but the poorer women who wanted to copy her found their own way they bleached their hair in human urine sure it sounds gross but every beautiful woman has to do a few things that just aren't pretty you

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Keywords: Strangest, Beauty Secrets, History, Most Beautiful Women

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Length: 14min 8sec (848 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 09 2019