On Monday’s blog, I talked about how Elizabethans smeared lead-based makeup on their faces. If you think that’s skeevy, how about bird poop?

Prior to the mid-19^th century, Japanese geisha achieved a porcelain-white skin with the time-honored combination of lead and zinc-based makeup.

Anyone’s teeth would look yellow in contrast. So geishas often painted their teeth black. Black teeth contrasted nicely with the snow-white pallor of the face.

To achieve a lustrous complexion, many geishas smeared their faces with–yes–bird droppings. Today many fashionable spas have begun offering bird-dropping facials. I am not making this up. If you don’t believe me, Google it.

At the Vatican ATM in Rome, users can perform their transactions in Latin.

__________

source: Mental Floss

Virtually every bee and ant that you see is a female.

Queen Elizabeth I by Steven van der Meulen (1543 - 1568)

By the time Elizabeth I was on the throne (in 1559), the ideal of female beauty was a snow-white face, with daubs of red on each cheek. To achieve the deathly pallor, women relied on ceruse, which is white lead. They slathered the stuff from hairline to bosom. Freckles and pockmarks from smallpox could be hidden by using a mixture containing powdered mercury. The whole surface was then spackled with egg white, which, when dried, gave the face a stiff and other-worldly sheen.

Unfortunately ceruse and mercury are highly toxic. The ceruse was made by steeping bars of lead in vinegar and urine and then scraping off the white powder that formed. Ceruse could lead to baldness, mental problems, and open sores. Mercury caused blackened teeth, an unsteady walk, and all too often, an early death.

After Elizabeth suffered a bout of smallpox, she began coating her face thickly with the lead paste—reputedly as much as half an inch thick in places—to smooth her pocked skin.

Lest you think these crazy cosmetics are a thing of the past, think again. According to this investigation conducted by the Chicago Tribune in 2010, testers found that several skin-lightening creams on the market contained toxic doses of mercury. There’s a booming market today for such creams; in some cultures, lighter skin is seen as a sign of higher status, while many Caucasians use the lighteners to erase blemishes and smooth out skin tone.

Stay tuned–Wednesday’s blog will be more fun-time lead-based cosmetics horror stories!

The Shuar tribe, who live between Ecuador and Peru, practiced ritual head shrinking as recently as the 1950s.

We interrupt this history blog to talk about . . .World Read Aloud Day, Wednesday, March 7^th, 2012.

Posters outside the library of the awesome educator, book blogger, and children's book advocate, John Schumaker (aka @MrSchureads)

My friend and amazing author, Kate Messner, has organized a bunch of children’s book authors who are willing to participate in free, 15-minute Skype visits for Litworld’s World Read Aloud Day.

Here’s what LitWorld says about it:

“World Read Aloud Day is about taking action to show the world that the right to read and write belongs to all people. World Read Aloud Day motivates children, teens, and adults worldwide to celebrate the power of words, especially those words that are shared from one person to another, and creates a community of readers advocating for every child’s right to a safe education and access to books and technology.”            ~from the LitWorld website

I did it last year and had so much fun talking to classrooms around the country. This year I’m pretty booked (I think I’m scheduled for eleven Skype visits that day), but if you are a teacher interested in finding authors for your class to speak with, please go to Kate’s website and see how to go about it. And if you find the authors on that list are booked already, don’t be shy about contacting another author directly through his/her website and asking. A lot of authors may not be aware that it’s WRAD and most of us are happy to Skype—so spread the word!

The Ancient Romans had a goddess of sewers, named Venus Cloacina. Stercutius was the God of Dung.

During Hurricane Katrina, Formosan termites played a large role in the failure of flood walls in New Orleans. The seams of the walls were made from sugarcane waste, a favorite food of termites.

source: American Entomologist (Vol. 54, No. 3)

Claude Monet, London, Houses of Parliament. The Sun Shining through the Fog, 1904

My past two blog posts have been about smoky cities in the U.S. Can you tell I’m obsessed? Today’s post will be about London fogs.

London used to be famous for its fogs. “Pea soupers,” they were affectionately called.  Growing up, I spent many hours reading Sherlock Holmes, Bleak House, and A Little Princess, and watching spooky movies like Jekyll and Hyde and Jack the Ripper,  so I pictured the city as dark and slightly ominous, swirling with fog. When I finally travelled to London in the early eighties, I was shocked by how bright it was.

In fact, heavy, dense fogs had been a fact of life for Londoners for decades.  This article in The Times of London (5 December 1837) describes a particularly dismal day:

It goes on to recount an incident where a coach crashed through a shop window, and how coaches and omnibuses had to have people leading the horses on foot through the streets.

An especially lethal fog rolled into London on December 5th, 1952. Similar to the inversion that had occurred in Donora in 1948 (which I blogged about on Friday), the dense air trapped smoke from the millions of coal fires close to ground level, so that people breathed air filled with tiny particles of sooty black coal. As the weather turned colder, people heaped more coal onto their fires.

London's Piccadilly 1952 © N T Stobbs and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence thanks to http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/765606

People walked blindly, their arms outstretched so as not to bash into anything, unable to see their own feet. Theater and opera performances were cancelled because auditoriums filled with fog, making it impossible to see the performance. Crime sprees were reported around the city.

The wind finally blew away the fog, but not before killing thousands of people in four days. According to this article in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, as many as 12,000 people may have died during or soon after the event.

This deadly environmental episode spawned public health research, the Clean Air Act of 1956, and new requirements that factories build taller chimneys.

In 986, a Viking named Bjarni Herjólfsson became the first European to spot North America. He was lost, trying to sail from Iceland to Greenland.