Mental Floss lists 11 Really Terrible 19th-Century Beauty Tips. They include:
- Bathe in ammonia.
- Don’t wash your face, hands, or hair.
- Dash soap suds into your eyes to keep them clean.
- Sit naked by the window in order to absorb sunlight and “vapor bathe.”
- Keep your eyelashes trimmed daily.
Strange, yes. Barbaric, even.
But years from now, a similar list could be made that includes things women are doing today, including:
- Paint your eyelid color shades of pink or green.
- Install bags of salt water and silicone jelly in your breasts to enhance their size.
- Harvest fat from various parts of your body and inject it into your butt to increase its size.
- Cook your skin to a shade of brown via cancerous ultraviolet radiation.
- Transform dermalogen from your skin into a collagen slurry, then inject it into your lips to enlarge them.
- Don shoes with heels that will permanently damage your feet over the course of a lifetime.
- Burn your hair daily until it is sufficiently straight.
Women aren’t the only ones behaving bizarrely.
Things men are doing today include:
- Redistribute hair follicles via surgery from one part of the body to the face to achieve a fuller beard.
- Inject Botox into the scrotum to smooth wrinkles.
- Surgically implant artificial hair onto the chest for a more manly appearance.
- Chew a rubber device designed to produce a more masculine jawline, despite little evidence it works.
- Hire a surgeon to sculpt your stomach to create the artificial appearance of six-pack abs.
- Shave skin from the nipple to reduce its size.
- Surgically insert implants to make lower legs appear more muscular.
Admittedly, these beauty tips for men are far less common, but they are also far more extreme and horrifying.
Less frequent. More crazy.
It’s easy to look back and see our predecessors as ignorant fools and craven monsters.
But it won’t be long before we will be seen as the same, and perhaps even worse, except in many cases, we know better.
We have more information and understanding today.
We’re still behaving ridiculously.
Today’s beauty regimens are tomorrow’s barbarism.
