Ancient cosmetics used often-toxic compounds to stave off old age

Evidence

Cleopatra bathed in goat’s milk, honey, and almond extract to soften her skin. Early Egyptians dabbed a mix of incense, wax, olive oil, cypress, and fresh milk on their faces for six days to ward off wrinkles. The Greeks and Romans continued these traditions and added some of their own. They used steam, sauna, and vapor baths and made face masks from figs mixed with banana, oatmeal, and rosewater. Lead carbonate whitened the face; mercuric sulfide added rose to the cheeks. To avert old age, a filtered mixture of asparagus roots, wild anise, lily bulbs, goat’s milk, and manure was applied to the face with soft bread. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 569

Categorization

• CANDY: Ancient beauty recipes — lead, mercury, and manure facials to cheat aging — are funny, tweetable material.
• SEED: A short piece on how ancient anti-aging cosmetics were radically more toxic than modern equivalents, showing fear of death trumps bodily safety.