The Long History of Toxic Cosmetics

For the record, there is no amount of lead considered safe for exposure, and while lead affects children more seriously, adults are still susceptible to many symptoms, such as high blood pressure, joint and muscle pain, headache and abdominal pain, mood disorders, and problems with conception and birth. High levels of exposure can cause severe damage in the kidneys and nervous system, which can eventually lead to seizures, unconsciousness, and death.

The Egyptians kind of eased us into the usage of lead. Every image of this people features the iconic, exaggerated, black eye makeup, which current science shows was a combination of malachite, galena (lead sulfide) and kohl, which was a “paste made of soot, fatty matter and metal…usually lead, antimony, manganese or copper.” 

So, while lead was a small ingredient in their makeup, dermatologist Joel Schlessinger says it still caused not only chronic pink eye, but the “ocular skin is most likely to absorb materials due to its thin, nearly transparent qualities. Couple this with the mucous membranes being a hop, skip and a jump away from the area where cosmetics are applied and you have a potentially serious problem.”

In Ancient Greece, for a clear complexion men and women both slathered lead face cream not just around their eyes, but all over their face. Ancient upper-class Romans used lead to whiten their faces and then add back a healthy rosy glow. They also used it as hair dye and for hair removal. Even the epic poet Ovid weighed in on the depilatory, advising, “No rankness of the wild goat under your armpits, no legs bristling with harsh hair!” Of course, some historians contribute the fall of all these empires to neurological and mental disorders brought on by lead poisoning, but there’s not sufficient evidence to fully support the claim—although it sounds plausible to me!

The Elizabethan era saw another surge in lead-based products, largely to conceal scars from the smallpox pandemic, hence the very-white faced complexions in many aristocratic portraits of the time. While they waited for their scars to heal, it’s documented that users “suffered side effects like grey hair, dried-out skin, severe abdominal pain, and constipation.” 

The biggest product of the period was “Venetian Ceruse,” and aside from the lead ingredient, many of the others seemed like they might have helped the case. A recent research project conducted by professors Jill Burke and Wilson Poon found that ingredients in the face cream included “sheep’s fat, vitamin E, and antioxidants.” Those are pretty good—but they don’t outweigh the lead exposure. There are even rumors that Queen Elizabeth I herself used Venetian Ceruse.

Venetian Ceruse and similar creams maintained popularity into the Renaissance, but other poisonous ingredients made their debuts at this time as well. Women actually put drops of deadly nightshade into their eyes to dilate their pupils to make them more attractive. Naturally, Italian women rebranded “deadly nightshade” to “belladonna” to remove naming the threat to their health, but the substance still caused “visual distortion, sensitivity to light, and if taken systemically (it) can kill you pretty quickly.”

By the way, while there are plenty of toxic ingredients to cover, one of these materials is just too gross not to mention, even if it wasn’t outright poisonous: Renaissance women were also concerned with hair removal, but they used cat feces as a depilatory. What fascinates me about this is that those users knew exactly what they were putting on their skin: there was no distance at all between them and how the product was manufactured. 

The 1800s ushered in the neurotoxin mercury as an ingredient. For quick reference, some symptoms of mercury poisoning include loss of peripheral vision, mood swings, insomnia, headaches, memory loss, “pins and needles” numbness in hands, feet, and mouth, lack of coordination, impaired speech, hearing, and walking, and muscle weakness.

Bichloride of mercury was popularized in a Harper’s Bazaar column called “The Ugly-girl papers Or, Hints for the Toilet.” Women with sparse eyebrows and eyelashes were recommended mercury as a nightly eye treatment. This was to get the look of “the consumptive”, says scholar Alexis Karl: she elaborates that the look was that of “the woman with the watery eyes and pale skin, which of course was from the cadaver in the throes of death.”

Many women also underwent some unnatural, homemade preparations, including a chemical peel that included Taraxacum, which “acts like a mild but imperceptible blister, and leaves a new skin, soft as an infant’s.” They also coated their faces with opium overnight, and washed with ammonia in the morning. 

Now, we get to the Victorians. The Victorians were all about pale skin, and one such way of getting it was through Dr. James P. Campbell’s Safe Arsenic Complexion Wafers. “Safe” was literally in the name of the product. But that didn’t make it safe.

We know arsenic as a poison, first and foremost, although it still is a component in some prescription medications. Arsenic poisoning results in “nervous system and kidney damage, hair loss, conjunctivitis, and growths called arsenical keratoses plague the body along with, yes, vitiligo, which causes pigment loss in the skin,” and as stated above, that last side effect was the desired one. Ultimately, arsenic did make the user pale: it did so by destroying red blood cells.

The Victorian Era also saw the trend of the Painted Woman, and the most famous of that ilk is Virginie Gautreau, an American-born Parisian socialite also known as the subject of John Singer Sargent’s 1884 painting “Madame X.” The oil painting portrays her skin as cadaver-white, which she achieved from arsenic-laden enamel. She and other women who used the enamel had to maintain a largely placid expression, or the enamel would literally crack. Gautreau even painted veins on her arms using indigo dye to get that deathly pale complexion.

And, like the wearers of the cat feces, Victorians knew about the toxicity of these substances. Victorian life was just so full of dangers like disease, fire, and war, that this one seemed subtle enough to overlook. 

Most of these toxic beauty substances saw at least a decrease in circulation during the 1920s, but that’s just about when the chemical element radium was coming into full swing. The most famous examples of its poisonous nature were of the Radium Girls in the Northeast United States, the factory workers who painted the hands of watches so that they’d glow in the dark for the soldiers during World War I. It wasn’t until after the war ended that they realized radium was not harmless, but actively killing the girls who had been working with it and even instructed to lick the brush tips for years.

Before they realized radium would make their teeth fall out and poison their whole bodies until they died horrifically painful deaths, some girls also painted their fingernails and faces with the glowing substance—after all, they’d been told when first hired—and many times since—that it was harmless. 

The element showed up in cosmetic lines like Tho-Radia in France, too, as late as the 1930s. Before the risks were widely known, beauty seekers thought the products would make their faces and teeth glow, so they purchased the full range of lipstick, facial powder, soaps, and even condoms.

The final blow to these toxic products in America came in 1938, with the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Earlier, in 1906, the Pure Food and Drug Act had been passed, and the FDA was subsequently formed. In 1936, its chief education officer Ruth DeForest Lamb published her book, American Chamber of Horrors, which illuminated many of these poisonous beauty products to those previously unaware. 

That publication helped to bring about the 1938 act as well as ongoing safety measures to prevent these tragedies from recurring. One such subsequent ordinance was the “the FDA’s 1977 requirement that U.S. cosmetic manufacturers list ingredients on the label.”

Nonetheless, it's still hard to know what exactly our beauty products contain…and just how much of it. Teresa Riordan, author of Inventing Beauty: A History of the Innovations That Have Made Us Beautiful, says that “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration does oversee cosmetics, but it’s an after-the-fact kind of oversight, where unsafe products can be taken off the market once they have been proved to be unsafe. Unlike drugs, cosmetics don’t have to go through clinical trials before they go on the market.”

Plus, even when we do know about toxic ingredients, do we really stop using our favorite products?

It’s true that Botox is made from the same toxin that causes botulism, and Brazilian Blowouts still contain formaldehyde. Many other substances are clearly labeled to warn away would-be consumers, too…but like our predecessors, we tend to soldier on, trust that regulations have made our products and procedures safe, or simply overlook inconvenient truths—as long as it makes us beautiful. 

Additional sources: Discover Magazine, CNN, Mayo Clinic