Why Edwardian Beauty Standards Were Deadly | Hidden Killers | Absolute History

[Music] I'm going upstairs to the bedroom in search of the next killer one that particularly affected half the population [Music] one of the consequences of the liberating social change of the period was that makeup which the Victorians had denounced as the mark of a loose woman became increasingly acceptable the new Edwardian woman needed a little Rouge and a dash of lipstick to look up to date the desire to look beautiful remains a constant through the ages but what is considered attractive in each era differs the art of beauty we always want to do the same things and what distinguishes the Victorian period from the Edwardian period is that in the Victorian period you were supposed to be perfectly beautiful with no assistance whatsoever in the Edwardian period you could use a little bit of help by now makeup was being sold over the counter in the new department stores and the products were advertised to Edwardian women by actresses famed for their beauty actresses were seen as more acceptable by Fiat audience and one particularly famous actress Lillie Langtry was actually noted very much for her beauty and she really capitalized on this by lending her name to various beauty products including face creams in this period Lillie Langtry here advertising pair soap and she was parently paid a hundred and thirty-two pounds which was exactly what she weighed lillie langtry x' beauty was known to have caught the eye of the king so it became a style to be copied but beauty came at a cost makeup was not subject to any safety testing many new products made bogus claims but were dangerous and in extreme cases a killer the death of a young girl who had managed to acquire perforation of the stomach through eating raw rice with a view to improving her complexion the Edwardian woman was told to make herself beautiful to catch her husband and to keep her husband by doing so she covered her face in poison the dangers began before any makeup had been applied with face cream an Edwardian lady had to have a pure lily-white skin to distinguish herself from the Sun tanned working classes and some of the most dangerous products are things like this this is Harriet Hubbard air moth and freckle lotion moths were sort of liver spots it was a 19th century term for liver spots and discolorations on the skin and a lot of them are except that well pretty much camphor bleach ammonia anything you could choose to sort of blanch your skin because you had to have a pure lily-white skin this later sort of 1909 vogue was advertising arsenic wafers which she would take to get rid of you know any poor skin issues and arsenic safe for that offending pimple on top of these layers of poison they put a dusting of toxic powder poisonous chemicals have very bright and distinctive colors and so there were lead compounds for example that were very white and so women like to use it on their skin as part of a face powder and that would be absorbed through the skin and could cause chronic lead poisoning different things we use faroush kosher nil which has made out of crushed insects that's fine but the million came from mercury mercury is a heavy metal and it's very bad for the body it can affect several different organs particularly the brain the lungs and the kidneys it can cause problems with sensation unable to feel things maybe unable to see and can cause you to go mad eventually even the eyes weren't safe there was a product for darkening your eyelashes and your eyebrows which actually made your cornea fall off and several people went blind one of the things that women like to use in the early 20th century was belladonna this is obtained from a plant and when drops are put in the eyes it makes a pupils dilate which is meant to signify desire and arousal and so made women look more attractive one of the problems with this of course is as it's a drug and when it's absorbed it can hasn't have an effect on the rest of the body at best it would probably have caught blurred vision and a dry mouth and at worst a very irregular heartbeat and even blindness you didn't know what was in these things there's no description of of content or anything like that because it would there was no legal obligation to do so a lot of new treatments are encouraged at this time all in the name of beauty the crowning glory of an Edwardian woman was her hair and to be truly fashionable it had to be curly croft and big a process that often destroyed what it was meant to enhance these elaborate hairstyles took a lot of effort effort that's inevitably led to unsafe practices with horrible consequences at the inquest dr. Charcot stated that the dry shampoo was exceedingly dangerous owing to the impracticability of keeping the fumes away from the customer [Music] there was a big problem in the Edwardian period of female baldness why were women going bored people were using very dangerous hair dyes which was one of the causes but the other big course I mean you'd have been fine with your fabulous curls but everybody curled their hair and so if you're doing that allow me to demonstrate this would give you a sort of a crimp yes for travelling you might have a little one like that so you were curling your hair the whole time and the dangers of burning with this were absolutely extreme tongs like these were heated in the fire and applied straight onto the hair often burning it off but worse was to follow Karl Metzler came up with the first permanent waving machine in 1906 but not before he'd burned his wife's hair off twice goodness was so definitely there's a reason for baldness if ever I saw one mess lers wonder machine involved wrapping the hair around rods and covering it with alkaline paste and most dangerously of all asbestos gas was then used to steam the curls tight it would take six hours it was extremely popular once your hair was right you have the challenge of adding a hat and so introduced another danger look at that whacking gray hat you couldn't put your hat on your head without huge hat pins these were up to 14 inches long and that was another very dangerous thing because you've got all that incredibly sort of sharp pointed end ladies were banned from wearing unprotected hat pins on omnibuses in case they scratched people suffragettes had their hat pins removed when they went into court in case they stabbed people and Edwardian novelists did do lovely little sort of vignettes of ladies preserving their virtue by stabbing an aggressor in a dirty old man with a hat pin ironically while she was killing herself to look beautiful the Edwardian middle-class woman was herself a killer of wildlife the biggest killer in the Edwardian home was undoubtedly the award e'en lady herself with her taste for hats decorated with the most exotic feathers and sometimes even hold dead birds thousands of songbirds egrets birds-of-paradise slaughtered in the name of millinery a public outcry led to the end of the fashioned for dead birds on hats and to the establishment of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to birds in 1904 women however continued to be the willing victims of the beauty industry bored blind burnt scarred Edwardian makeup was a dangerous business in fact the early 20th century was poised on the verge of the mass production of cosmetics and the explosion of a whole new industry one that would test their products first before releasing them on consumers you

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 1,076,545

Rating: 4.9021807 out of 5

Keywords: history history documentary funny history fun history school, timeline, absolute history, skin care, edwardian history, edwardian history documentary, suzannah lipscomb, suzannah lipscomb documentary, suzannah lipscomb hidden killers

Id: SyScf0qRaNU

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 30 2019