In a mid-nineteenth-century sickroom, a physician recorded the condition of a woman poisoned with deadly nightshade. Her pupils were fixed and enormous, the whites of her eyes shot through with blood. Her skin was hot and dry, her pulse hammered, and the world around her swam double, as if underwater. Every detail of that description was standard medical observation.

The odd thing was that the first items on the doctor’s list, those huge, glittering, black pupils, were something women across Europe and America were paying for deliberately. Drop by drop, they put the poison into their own eyes before a ball, a dinner, or an evening at the theater. The plant behind this fashion is Atropa belladonna. The name means beautiful woman, earned in the sixteenth century from Italian women who pressed the juice of its glossy black berries into their eyes.

The juice contains atropine, which paralyzes the tiny muscle that closes the pupil. The pupil falls open wide and black and stays that way for days. By candlelight, such eyes looked deep, dark, and inviting, the eyes of a woman in love or in fear. The other half of the genus name, Atropos, belongs to the Greek fate who cuts the thread of human life.

Linnaeus, naming the plant in the 1750s, chose the goddess of the moment of death. Everything about deadly nightshade is a trap. It grows wild across Europe, a bushy plant with dull purple bells and, in late summer, berries the size of small cherries, black and sweet. Most poisonous plants taste bitter and are spit out.

These taste pleasant, and for a small child, a handful can kill. A drop or two of the solution before an evening out gave a woman the desired pupils and cost her the ability to focus on anything close. She could not sew, could not read a letter held in her hand, poured tea by memory, and judged distances badly. Daylight became physically painful.

Chronic use brought a feverish quality, a flushed skin, a dry mouth. Modern medical students memorize the picture of atropine poisoning with a rhyme: hot as a hare, dry as a bone, red as a beet, blind as a bat, mad as a hatter. In quantity, atropine crosses into the brain, producing hallucinations, incoherent speech, and failure to recognize loved ones. In bad cases, convulsions and coma follow, with death arriving when the muscles of the lungs stop.

The line between the fashionable dose and the poisonous one was thin and moved. The same drug that decorated a woman’s eyes was in her liniments, her plasters, and her cough mixtures, all stored on the same shelf. Accidental poisonings filled the medical journals. Even used exactly as directed, the plasters released atropine through the skin, leaving patients flushed and confused.

Queen Victoria herself was given belladonna drops in her last years to spring her cataracts open so a little light could reach her eyes, the same trick the Venetian courtesans had used three centuries earlier for opposite reasons. From the eyes, the fashion moved to the torso. Every respectable woman in the western world wore a corset from about age twelve until death. Tight lacing was a different sport, reducing the natural waist by four, five, or six inches and holding it there through every waking hour, sometimes through sleep.

Mothers laced daughters, and school girls were measured as part of the curriculum. Museum collections hold surviving corsets closed to waist measurements a modern adult could span with two hands. Anatomists who examined long-term tight lacers found the lower ribs bent inward and downward, sometimes nearly meeting, the cage remodeled into a narrow cone. The liver came out of autopsies with deep grooves pressed into its surface, as though someone had tied string around a lump of clay.

They called it the corset liver. The stomach was squeezed to a fraction of its volume and shoved downward, the intestines pressed into the pelvis. Doctors blamed the practice for indigestion, fainting, palpitations, prolapsed wombs, and miscarriages. A tight corset made it mechanically impossible to breathe with the diaphragm, leaving only shallow upper-chest sips.

That explains the fainting couch and the smelling salts at every ball. The Lancet averaged more than an article a year on the dangers of tight lacing from the late 1860s into the 1890s. Coroners kept finding the corset at inquests. In 1870, Jemima Hall, a twenty-one-year-old London servant, died.

Her stomach was smaller than that of an ordinary infant, her heart weighed just four ounces, and the organs of her body were contracted and out of their places. Cause of death: tight lacing. In 1851 in Bristol, a healthy twenty-two-year-old woman was found dead with no disease anywhere except the compression of the stomach from tight lacing. The verdict was suffocation hastened by the corset.

In 1888 in Detroit, Mary Crawford collapsed and died at a dance two days before her wedding. Her corset was drawn so tightly that the exertion of dancing had burst a blood vessel. The most theatrical death came on the day after Christmas 1894 at the Elephant and Castle Theatre in London, where the actress Kitty Tur staggered off stage during a pantomime, found her husband in the wings, and said, Good God, oh Harry, do unfasten my stays. I’m dying.

She lost consciousness before he could get the laces off and never woke up. The coroner found a pre-existing heart condition aggravated by tight lacing. Resistance existed. Amelia Bloomer lent her name to a costume of loose trousers in the 1850s, and the public responded with a national laughing fit.

The Rational Dress Society, founded in 1881, protested any fashion that deformed the figure and held that no woman should be required to carry more than seven pounds of underclothing. It received the full bloomer treatment, Punch cartoons and dinner party mockery. The reformers had the dissection plates and half a century of inquest verdicts. The other side had every ballroom in the country.

Most women kept lacing, because the waist was currency. A small waist signaled discipline, refinement, and marriageability. An unlaced woman in respectable society was seen as loose in every sense. From within the body came the next fashion.

In 1851, a Swiss physician published an article about peasants in the Austrian Alps who ate arsenic deliberately, as a habit, the way other men took tobacco. They began with a crumb the size of a lentil and gradually increased the dose over years. The men said it helped their wind for climbing the steep mountains. The young women had a fresh complexion and a rosy glow.

Word of the arsenic-fed farm girls traveled through the medical press and then into the plans of every complexion-conscious woman in Europe and America. Arsenic already had a respectable medical career in Fowler’s solution, prescribed for everything from psoriasis to asthma. Products appeared, sold openly. Dr.

James P. Campbell’s safe arsenic complexion wafers, 120 tablets to a box for a dollar, carried the words guaranteed absolutely safe and harmless to anybody in capitals. The advertising promised to permanently remove freckles, pimples, vulgar redness, and to ensure a deliciously clear complexion. The pale, waxy, luminous look the wafers produced was real.

It happened because arsenic attacks the blood and small vessels of the skin. The beauty was a phase of the poisoning. Arsenic accumulates. The next stage brought bronzed, mottled skin darkening, horny growths on the palms, hair loss, goiter, and then the nerves began to die, starting in the feet and hands, numbness creeping upward until some users could no longer button a dress.

Chronic arsenic is a potent cause of cancer. One grave in St. Louis became the unofficial monument. Kate Brewington Bennett, celebrated as one of the most beautiful women in the city for her flawless, marble-white skin, died in 1855.

An autopsy found she had been taking small doses of arsenic for years to keep that paleness. Her monument, an elaborate Gothic marble canopy, stands to this day. A wealthy man’s grief carved over a woman who achieved the complexion of a marble statue and then became one. Arsenic had another life in the color green.

In 1775, a chemist cooked up a brilliant pigment from copper and arsenic. Scheele’s green and its successor, Paris green, went into wallpaper, candles, children’s toys, and ball gowns. A green dress of the 1850s carried a startling amount of arsenic in its dye, and it shed with every movement. In 1861, Matilda Scheurer, a nineteen-year-old artificial flower maker in London, died after years of breathing powdered green dye.

She vomited green, the whites of her eyes turned green, and she told her doctor that everything she looked at was green. The last arsenic wallpaper did not leave the market until around 1890. The walls did the most damage of all. Damp rooms bred mold on the paste, and the mold working on the pigment released an arsenical vapor that families breathed all winter.

Children in freshly papered nurseries grew listless and sick, recovered at the seaside, and sickened again on returning home. The trade fought the doctors, and William Morris, whose wallpapers defined refined taste, sat on the board of the largest arsenic works in the world and dismissed the scare as witch fever. Customers outran him anyway, and arsenical paper was commercially dead by the century’s last decade. The fingers of poison reached even the eyelashes.

In 1899, a Scottish newspaper described a beauty procedure for lengthening lashes. A fine needle was threaded with a long hair, usually from the person’s own head. The lower border of the eyelid was cleaned and rubbed with a solution of cocaine. Then the operator ran the needle through the edge of the eyelid, in and out, leaving loops of hair in carefully graduated lengths.

Adults had their own versions. In 1916, on the set of the film Intolerance, a wig maker glued a strip of human hair along the actress Seena Owen’s eyelids with spirit gum. She looked extraordinary, and she arrived the next morning with her eyes swollen nearly shut. The false eyelash entered the world through an actress half blinded by its first morning.

Behind the eyes and the pale skin sat the single most influential force shaping what a beautiful woman was supposed to look like in the nineteenth century: tuberculosis, the most lethal disease of the age. At its height, it accounted for as much as one in four of all deaths in Europe and America. Somewhere across the decades around 1800, the look of dying from tuberculosis became the look of beauty itself. The pale translucent skin, the vivid flush on the cheekbones, the wide glittering eyes, the fragile wasted figure, all of it was the disease burning through a body.

Poets made consumption the artist’s disease, a refining fire. Keats, who had trained as a doctor, coughed onto his pillow one winter night in 1820, asked for a candle, looked at the stain, and told his friend it was his death warrant. The culture that raised its young women to chase that look produced the glamour of the Brontes, who died one after another, and of Elizabeth Siddal, whose frailty made her more paintable until an overdose of laudanum ended her at thirty-two. The fever finally broke on a specific date.

On the 24th of March 1882, Robert Koch stood up in Berlin and announced he had found the cause of tuberculosis, a bacterium passed from person to person in coughed droplets. Consumption stopped being a matter of sensitive souls and became a germ. You cannot romance a germ. The long trailing skirt was recast as a public menace sweeping infected sputum off the pavement.

Hemlines rose for hygiene before they rose for liberation. The magnificent Victorian beard was condemned as a germ reservoir, and faces got shaved. The pale consumptive angel left the fashion plates, replaced by an ideal with color in her cheeks from the outdoors. The sixth and last fashion sat directly on the skin.

The whitening paints all came back to one metal, lead, corroded with vinegar into a compound of astonishing whiteness. The Victorians called the practice enameling. A woman was coated in a smooth, poreless white finish, face, neck, shoulders, everything the gown left visible. She could not smile, because dried enamel cracks, and a good laugh could split the finish across a cheek.

Some salons advertised enameling that would last the season, built up layer over layer. Under the varnish, the skin was dying. Lead is directly corrosive over time, drying and graying the skin, so the user painted thicker to cover the damage the paint had caused. Lead absorbs through the skin and the body mistakes it for calcium and banks it in the bones.

The results were unmistakable: a blue-black line along the gums, and in the worst cases, wrist drop, where the nerves that lift the hand die and the hand hangs limp. On the 27th of September 1868, a nineteen-year-old girl was brought to Dr. Lewis Sayre, one of the most prominent surgeons in America. Both her wrists had dropped, the muscles of her hands wasted until the bones stood out.

Along her gums ran the blue-black line. For two and a half years, she had been applying a commercial beauty lotion called Laird’s Bloom of Youth, which claimed to be harmless and carried a certification from the New York Board of Health. It was loaded with lead. Sayre took her off it, and she recovered.

He presented his cases to the American Medical Association, which issued a public warning. The company kept selling, because no law existed. Cosmetics in America went completely unregulated for another seven decades. The colors on top of the white belonged to an even older poison family.

Red lip and cheek color was often vermilion, a compound of mercury. Mercury’s real stronghold was the miracle skin cure, freckle removers and blemish washes built on corrosive sublimate, which burns off the surface layer of skin and, with repeat use, delivers chronic mercury poisoning. The mouth waters, the teeth loosen, the hands develop the hatter’s tremor, and the kidneys begin to fail. The appetite for such things built an empire for a woman calling herself Madame Rachel, who opened a beauty house on New Bond Street in 1863 under the slogan Beautiful forever.

Her preparations were built on arsenic, corrosive sublimate, and lead. Her real trade was blackmail. She convinced a wealthy widow that a lord had fallen in love with her and stripped her of something on the order of five thousand pounds. Rachel went to prison for fraud, came out, returned to the same trade, and died inside in 1880.

The law finally moved in 1938, when Congress passed the act that put cosmetics under federal control, pushed over the line by a mass poisoning case. In the early 1930s, a product called Lash Lure, a permanent dye for lashes and brows, was hitting American beauty parlors. A woman named Mrs. Brown had her eyes dyed for a club event.

Within hours they were burning, and over the following weeks the dye’s chemistry ate the surface of both corneas into open ulcers. She survived permanently blind. Federal inspectors assembled her photographs into a traveling exhibit of unregulated horrors nicknamed the American Chamber of Horrors. Eleanor Roosevelt walked through it and took the photographs personally to the White House.

Lash Lure was among the first products seized under the new law. 1938, sixty-nine years after Dr. Sayre stood before the American Medical Association with the case notes of three poisoned girls, the answer arrived. In the collections of the Smithsonian in Washington sits a small box wrapped in blue and white paper, a surviving box of Dr.

James P. Campbell’s safe arsenic complexion wafers, a hundred and twenty doses of arsenic for a dollar, waiting under glass with its label still lying.