The deadly risks of a Victorian Beauty regime - Photography

The deadly risks of a Victorian beauty regime Aspiring to classical ideals, 19th-century aristocrats applied lead, ammonia and radium powder to their skin and eyes, and bathed in arsenic springs. A splash of mercury on your eyelashes. A few drops of deadly nightshade in your eyes. A dash of ammonia for your face. It’s not that Victorian women didn’t know these beauty practices were dangerous. They were perfectly aware that nightshade could cause blindness; that ammonia could corrode the skin. They just felt like it was worth it, according to Alexis Karl, a Brooklyn-based artist, perfumer and researcher. For “Dangerous Beauty,” an upcoming lecture at New York’s Morbid Anatomy Museum — a Brooklyn exhibition space devoted to exploring “the intersections of death, beauty and that which falls between the cracks” — Karl has been delving into the archives of Victorian beauty manuals, advice columns and old issues of Harper’s Bazaar, with a focus on England, France and the United States. In the Victorian era, Karl told Women in the World, aristocratic women were trying to achieve a set of beauty standards influenced by classical ideals. “They’re looking back at Hellenistic work — this archetype of beauty: the perfect marble statue, the perfection of form, the perfection of skin,” Karl said. Another trend: the “dying of tuberculosis” look. Weakness and fragility were in, and “consumptives were thought to be very beautiful,” Karl said. That meant women were striving for “big, watery eyes,” an “extremely cinched waist” and “extremely pale, translucent skin.” White skin connoted “purity, innocence, health, beauty … and also class,” Karl said. “Women of money are going to have white skin — they’re not going to be working outside.” Many of the cleansers and potions Victorian women brewed contained highly toxic ingredients, like radium powder, ammonia and a kind of opium that can be extracted from lettuce stalks. Face paint usually contained lead enamel, and painting on makeup meant risking not just exposure to deadly chemicals, but to social embarrassment as well. “If they were too expressive, their faces would crack like a china doll,” Karl said. Women didn’t stop at merely applying toxins to their skin and eyes. In Bavaria, women bathed in an arsenic spring. “They were said to emerge looking like goddesses,” Karl said — “curly and white” (and poisoned). Sometimes, women even ingested toxins. Arsenic wafers were thought to improve the skin’s translucence. Music; Erik Satie