Today’s Flatly Incredible Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
In 1863, poisoner Lydia Sherman was able to easily procure an ounce of powdered arsenic from a drugstore near her home in Harlem. The druggist who dispensed the poison would not have raised an eyebrow at Lydia’s request. Arsenic was a popular over-the-counter item at the time, sold in various forms and used – bizarrely enough – as both a pesticide and a beauty product. A homeowner whose premises were infested with rodents might deal with the problem by sprinkling his floorboards with an arsenic compound called “Rough on Rats.” At the same time, his adolescent daughter might hope to improve her complexion by dosing herself with “Bellavita Arsenic Beauty Tablets” – absolutely guaranteed (according to the newspaper ads) to eliminate “Pimples, Blotches, Freckles, Sunburn, Discolorations, Eczema, Blackheads, Roughness, Redness, and to Restore the Bloom of Youth to Faded Faces!” That American women would eagerly ingest rat poison for its supposedly cosmetic properties seems flatly incredible to us – equivalent to treating a bad case of acne by swallowing a few shots of Raid. But it was typical of those wildly unregulated, pre-FDA days, when the marketplace was flooded with medicinal cure-alls concocted of everything from cocaine and chloroform to morphine and mercury.
Culled from: Fatal : The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer
Queen Elizabeth I of England also used arsenic as a cosmetic for her face. It was a favorite cosmetic even before her time.