20 Dangerous Fashion And Beauty Trends From History

The color green is such an elegant choice compared to the usual black, white, and champagne. In the 1800s, there was Paris Green, an emerald color that was used to color dresses and wreaths of flowers. Sounds like a dream if it weren’t loaded with so much arsenic that it gave rashes to both the wearers and workers alike. It got up to a point where 19-year-old flower maker Matilda Scheurer died foaming at the mouth, sporting her Paris Green nails.

The real-life Mad Hatter came in the form of hatters who used mercury to process felt for men’s hats in the 18th and 19th centuries. The fumes they inhaled from the mercury slowly seeped into their brains, causing tremors and paranoia that shook the hatters in question.

No diet or exercise could ever amount to the effort it took to cinch the waist of Victorian women. It literally came at the cost of their organs to get that snatched look that was so in. Doctors blamed these tight clothes of doom for cases of fainting, internal bleeding, and a long list of ailments that kept happening to women who wore them. To make matters worse, one woman, Mary E. Halliday, died with two pieces of corset steel found lodged in her heart, which doctors speculated she had either swallowed or which had migrated through her body over time.

Who cares if you can easily be lit on fire as long as you can look cute, right? This was probably the thought process of these women who wore crinoline skirts that gave their dresses that dramatic sweep, which was quite the trend in the 19th century. However, it was such a hazard that it caught fire whenever it was near fireplaces or candles. It was partly to blame for an estimated 3,000 deaths in the UK alone during that time, including the wife of poet Longfellow and the half-sisters of writer Oscar Wilde.

One fashion trend that targeted men was the detachable starched collar in the 19th century, which allowed men to skip changing their shirts daily. This was then dubbed the father-killer when it was found stiff enough to cut off the blood to their necks. Even something as simple as nodding off in your chair could end your life!

In ancient China, women not only had to be subordinate to men, but they had to mutilate their feet to fit (pun not intended) into ridiculous beauty standards. To make things worse, this would start in their early childhood when part of the bones of their feet were broken off and folded into a narrow shape. This, in turn, resulted in infections and lifelong ailments. Beauty is pain indeed.

Notice how white nobles’ faces were before? This was seen as a sign of wealth during that era, when Queen Elizabeth I reigned, and the fastest way to achieve that was by painting their faces with lead. The toxic makeup caused skin to burn away and led to even more skin complications that went as far as causing paralysis.

Pretty sure Marie Curie discovered radium in 1898 for it not to be used on a human’s face. However, in order to achieve that radiant glow, beauty product manufacturers decided to incorporate this material into their products, some of them being France’s Tho-Radia and England’s Radior. The effects were severe, as it was found that prolonged use caused anemia and cancer.

Achieving big, beautiful, and dreamy eyes is no easy feat, but for Victorian women, it was as easy as dripping oil from the belladonna plant into their eyes to achieve this. But belladonna is a known deadly nightshade and one of the most poisonous plants on Earth. The drops could cause lasting negative effects on one’s eyes and could potentially blind them. Wasn’t such a bright idea, was it?

The lengths most Victorians would go to achieve a semblance of social status in this era were astounding. Celluloid combs, which were widely used as they were an affordable imitation of ivory or tortoiseshell, were a highly flammable material and could explode if they got too hot. It has reportedly claimed the life of a man grooming his hair close to a heat source.

Being as tall as a beauty queen was not the goal, but maybe as tall as a 20-story building could be. During the 15th to 17th centuries, European women wore chopine platforms that reached up to 20 inches tall to signal wealth and status. These shoes were so absurdly tall that losing your balance could guarantee a broken bone or two.

Those tall, white, curly wigs that sat on the top of the heads of known public figures in the 1600s and 1700s were a spectacle to be seen. Starting with the balding Louis XIII, wigs held status and were definitely a filthy secret. Beneath that tall stature is a lice-infested catastrophe, though tales of mice nesting inside are just satirical legend. Built a home for himself and other living things, apparently.

Thin white muslin gowns trended so badly with European women in the 1800s that they wore them regardless of season. This was, however, a bad idea with the cold weather at that time, which in turn caused deadly pneumonia in these women.

Bright-colored socks made their first appearance when aniline dyes hit the market in the 1860s. This gave men’s socks vividly colored stripes. The only thing is that the chemicals attached to the dye leaked onto the skin and burned it. It also caused inflamed and blistered feet. The workers who administered the dye also developed bladder cancer in the process.

Flannelette was a cheap material used to make comfortable nightshirts and children’s pajamas in the 1800s. As the material was light, it was a fire hazard for many households that used candles. This resulted in a lot of child-related deaths during those years.

Another case of a forced small waist is the myth that Victorians would literally take off a rib from their body to achieve this. But this is actually a debunked urban legend that never really happened. Since this is literally unnecessary mutilation, it could have caused fatal infections for those who got it. Guess I’ll stick to my diet then.

Before teeth whitening was a thing, teeth blackening was a mark of beauty and status in Japan and some parts of Asia. In Japan, it was called ohaguro, and to achieve this, it meant that they had to paint an iron-based black dye onto their teeth. Unlike most of the cases here, this dye actually acted as a protective sealant against tooth decay. In 1870, Japan’s Meiji government banned the practice among the nobility, and it gradually fell out of fashion after the imperial family stopped blackening their teeth in 1873.

Just in 2015, a 35-year-old Australian woman had to have her skinny jeans cut off. This was because she was developing compartment syndrome, where dangerous pressure was building inside her muscles. The ultra-tight jeans squeezed her legs so much that they needed intervention!

One more case of flammable materials used in the 19th century is the ballerina tutus made of gauze and tulle. This would not have been a problem if theaters did not often work with gas and open flames, but they do, and this resulted in young performers blazing aflame mid-show. Maybe we could just hand the fire shows to the professionals.

The distressed look your jeans are sporting, surprisingly, is a health hazard to those creating them. In order to achieve that kind of look, workers had to spray raw denim with sand, and breathing in that much sand posed so many health risks, including complications to their lungs. This technique was banned in Turkey in 2009, but demand has still risen, so it might still be the norm for some; it just has not been found yet. Now, that is a sad case.

This content was created with the help of AI.