Toxic beauty
People at the beginning of the 20th century were willing to do whatever it took to make their skin look as bright and flawless as possible – even if it had dangerous consequences. It turns out that people would eat arsenic wafers in a bid to clear their skin. While people might have been willingly ingesting the harmful chemical, they had no idea of the danger they were in.
The wafers claimed to remove any impurities and even out skin tone. Amazingly, it did work, but only because arsenic removes red blood cells from our blood. People would often lose their hair, and if they stopped using the wafers, their skin would usually worsen. As the benefits seemed to outweigh the dangers to many, they continued to use the products until the 1920s.
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