For Most of History, Your Makeup Was Trying to Kill You.
Quick Answer
What is the history of dangerous beauty products? From ancient Rome through the 20th century, mainstream cosmetics routinely contained lead, arsenic, belladonna, and radioactive compounds. Women were poisoned by their foundation, blinded by their eyedrops, and given radiation exposure from their face cream. The U.S. government did not regulate cosmetics until 1938, after a mascara called Lash Lure blinded more than a dozen women. Before that, nobody was required to check whether your face cream was safe before selling it to you.
Lash Lure mascara didn't just smear. It blinded twelve women. One of them died. The year was 1933, the product was being sold openly in beauty salons across the United States, and there was no law against it. Cosmetics were not regulated. They had never been regulated. The idea that someone should check whether your face cream was safe before selling it to you was, in 1933, a genuinely novel concept.
That's where the story ends. The beginning starts 2,000 years earlier, in ancient Rome, with a paste made of lead.
The white lead that ate their faces
The standard Roman beauty ideal for women was pale skin. Not sun-kissed. Pale. The whiter the better, signaling that you didn't work outdoors, didn't labor, belonged to a class of people whose bodies existed for decoration rather than function. To achieve this, Roman women used lead white: lead carbonate made by exposing lead sheets to vinegar fumes, mixed with water or fat and applied directly to the face.
It worked. It made skin perfectly, uniformly pale. It also, over time, corroded it, causing inflammation, erosion, and gray-green discoloration beneath the surface. The solution to the damage was more lead white, to cover what was underneath. More lead caused more damage. The cycle continued until the skin structure was substantially gone.
Greek and Roman physicians knew lead was poisonous. They wrote about it. The knowledge existed in the same culture that sold the product, and nothing changed.
The practice peaked in Elizabethan England, where the compound was called ceruse. Queen Elizabeth I used it to cover the pockmarks left by smallpox. She is not the cautionary tale here. She is the example everyone else was following. Aristocratic women across Europe were doing the same. Some portraits of Elizabeth in her later years show painters working with a face that had lost the structure of earlier decades: the skin eroded by decades of the compound she used to look like herself.
The Victorian arsenic beauty routine
By the 19th century, lead-based cosmetics were being phased out. Arsenic replaced them.
In Victorian England and the United States, arsenic complexion wafers were sold in pharmacies and taken internally (swallowed, not applied) on the theory that arsenic in small doses would whiten the skin from the inside. The arsenic content was listed on the label. The packaging sometimes called it a health supplement.
These were not fringe products. Fowler's Solution, a 1% arsenic trioxide solution in water, was prescribed by doctors for skin complaints, malaise, and general wellness. Patients took it for years, accumulating arsenic in their tissues. Doctors knew it was toxic. They prescribed it anyway. The dose made the medicine, they figured, until it didn't.
The overlap with actual murder is direct. As our post on the real history of arsenic and women who used it covers, arsenic was simultaneously the fashionable beauty aid and the preferred murder weapon of the 19th century. Same compound. Different marketing. The woman buying arsenic wafers at the pharmacy and the woman slipping arsenic into her husband's food were buying the same thing from the same shelf.
Belladonna was running a parallel operation on women's eyes. A few drops of belladonna extract dilated the pupils dramatically, which Victorian society found beautiful. The name means "beautiful woman" in Italian, which tells you this had been going on for a while. Long-term use caused progressive blindness. The product named after female beauty caused women to go blind in pursuit of it.
The radioactive face cream
In 1933, a Paris pharmacist named Alexis Moussalli and a physician named Alfred Curie (no relation to Marie and Pierre, though Moussalli was not particularly interested in that distinction) launched Tho-Radia, a cosmetics line containing thorium chloride and radium bromide. Both are radioactive. The range included day cream, night cream, rouge, lipstick in twelve colors, soap, toothpaste, and beauty milk. It was marketed as scientific, anti-aging, and circulation-improving. The name Curie did the rest.
By 1933, the Radium Girls, factory workers at the United States Radium Corporation who had been painting watch dials with radium paint and told to point their brushes with their lips, had been dying for years. Their lawsuits were public. The connection between radium exposure and fatal illness was not hidden information. Tho-Radia launched the same year. It sold well until 1937, when French regulations required removing radioactive compounds from cosmetics.
The brand continued operating for another twenty-five years. It just stopped glowing.
The mascara and the law
Lash Lure arrived in American beauty salons in the early 1930s. It promised permanently darkened lashes and brows. It contained p-phenylenediamine, an aniline coal tar dye. Women who used it developed severe reactions: swollen eyelids, ulceration, infection. Twelve went permanently blind. One died.
The FDA was aware of Lash Lure. They could not remove it from shelves. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 covered food and medicine. Cosmetics were not included. The agency had no jurisdiction over what went into your face cream, your mascara, or your rouge.
In 1933, the FDA assembled a display of dangerous products they were legally unable to regulate and sent it to the Chicago World's Fair. Journalists called it the "Chamber of Horrors." Lash Lure was in it. So was a radium-based product marketed for weight loss. So was a cream that contained rat poison.
Congress took five more years. The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 was the first federal law to give the government authority over cosmetics. Lash Lure was among the first products removed. Before 1938, there was no requirement to test whether your face cream was safe before selling it. The assumption was that the market would sort it out, which it had not, for approximately 2,000 years.
What the through-line is
None of this was ignorance. Roman physicians documented lead poisoning. Victorian doctors prescribed arsenic while noting its cumulative toxicity. The radium industry watched workers die and launched beauty products the same year. The manufacturers knew. The physicians knew. The regulatory gap was not an oversight. It was the default.
The answer to "why did women keep using these products" is the same reason they've always been given to buy things that promise to fix their faces: because they'd been told their faces needed fixing. The products promised to correct the problem. The problem was invented to sell the products. The products also happened to be killing them, which nobody in a position to stop it found sufficiently alarming until a mascara blinded twelve women in one year.
The Make Up Addict Skull T-shirt is in the girl power collection. At least the skull is honest about what it is.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Why did historical cosmetics contain lead?
Lead white (lead carbonate) produced an exceptionally pale, even finish that no other substance replicated as well. Pale skin signaled wealth and social status in ancient Rome and Renaissance Europe: it meant you didn't work outdoors. The cosmetic effect was immediate and effective. The health consequences were cumulative and slow, which made it easy to continue using. Greek and Roman physicians documented lead poisoning, but that knowledge coexisted with the product for centuries. The lead cosmetic cycle was particularly destructive: the compound eroded skin over time, requiring more lead to cover the damage, which caused more erosion.
Were arsenic beauty products real?
Yes. In the 19th century, arsenic complexion wafers were sold openly in pharmacies in England and the United States, advertised as a skin-whitening supplement meant to be taken internally. Fowler's Solution, a 1% arsenic trioxide preparation, was prescribed by doctors for skin conditions and general health. The arsenic content was listed on product labels. Small doses were considered beneficial; the toxicity was cumulative. The same arsenic compound sold as a beauty product was simultaneously the most commonly used poison in 19th century murder cases, which our post on the history of arsenic as a murder weapon covers in detail.
What was Lash Lure mascara and why was it dangerous?
Lash Lure was a mascara sold in American beauty salons in the early 1930s that promised permanently darkened lashes and brows. It contained p-phenylenediamine, a coal tar dye. Women who used it developed severe allergic reactions, including eyelid swelling, ulceration, and infection. More than a dozen women were permanently blinded. One woman died. At the time, cosmetics were not covered by federal safety regulations, and the FDA had no authority to remove the product from sale. Lash Lure was featured in the FDA's 1933 "Chamber of Horrors" exhibit of dangerous unregulated products. The 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, the first law to regulate cosmetics in the United States, was passed partly in response to cases like Lash Lure's.
What were Tho-Radia and other radioactive cosmetics?
Tho-Radia was a French cosmetics line launched in 1933 containing thorium chloride and radium bromide. Both are radioactive. The brand was co-founded by a physician named Alfred Curie, who had no connection to Marie and Pierre Curie but whose name provided useful marketing association. The product line included creams, rouge, lipstick in twelve colors, toothpaste, and soap. It was marketed as scientifically advanced, anti-aging, and circulation-improving. Radioactive products were widely marketed in this era as health aids. Tho-Radia removed radioactive compounds from its formulations in 1937 when French regulations required it, but continued operating as a cosmetics brand until 1962.
When did the government start regulating cosmetics?
In the United States, the first federal law covering cosmetics was the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. Before this, cosmetics were entirely unregulated at the federal level. There was no requirement to test products for safety, disclose ingredients, or remove products that harmed consumers. The FDA had been advocating for expanded authority throughout the early 1930s, using exhibits of dangerous unregulated products to demonstrate the gap. The 1938 Act gave the FDA authority to regulate cosmetics and was passed in part as a response to widely publicized cases of injury, including the Lash Lure mascara blindings.
What was belladonna used for in beauty?
Belladonna (deadly nightshade) extract was used as eye drops to dilate the pupils, which was considered beautiful in Victorian and Renaissance Europe. The name "belladonna" is Italian for "beautiful woman," reflecting how long-established the practice was. Dilated pupils were associated with attractiveness and romantic interest. The effect was cosmetically successful and medically dangerous: repeated use caused blurred vision, sensitivity to light, and with prolonged use, progressive blindness. The same plant compound is still used by ophthalmologists today to dilate pupils during eye exams, at controlled doses and with appropriate monitoring.
