6 Comments
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Dystopian Dog's avatar

Very interesting story! Where can one learn more about her? Do you know if she had influence outside of England?

We've definitely not evolved out of doing ourselves visible and invisible harm to meet a constructed and exploitative beauty standard.

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Utter's avatar

I blame the patriarchy.

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ProfessorChessDad's avatar

Perhaps this added element of gathering secrets about and threatening to blackmail your clients is what social media beauty influencers are missing these days!

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Katherine Brodsky's avatar

They should really give it a try!

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Stephen Klimczuk-Massion's avatar

This really does deserve a movie... Of course back in the day products were sold with ingredients that would astonish or horrify us today... as when Coca-Cola literally had cocaine in it (it's still made using coca leaf extract) and 7-Up had the mood-stabilizing drug lithium in it until the late 1940s... as for fountain-of-youth beauty treatments, you should patent one of your own, as whatever you're doing, it's working beautifully!

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Katherine Brodsky's avatar

Those were the days! It's really fascinating how these beauty norms evolved and what people used. A lot of it is actually in incredibly political and a reflection of social morals. And yes, coke has quite a history too.

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