Beauty Secrets of the Ancients - I

Many things have been done in the name of Beauty which, in hindsight, were just plain nutso. Mercury facials, lead paste, stinging insects, women and men have gone to extreme lengths to make themselves attractive according to the standards of the times.

Egyptian women of the 16th and 17th Dynasties found that a bite from a young cobra would cause the skin around the bite to contract and become smooth. The neurotoxins in the venom were stimulating paralysis of their facial muscles, but the age of the cobras and the relative strength of the venom meant that the paralysis was short lived and relatively harmless (as harmless as snake venom gets, at least.) A consequence of the repeated snakebites was that the women would develop an immunity to the venom, requiring more and more bites to produce the same skin-tightening effect. Fortunately, one of the reforms that pharaoh Akhenaten introduced when he ascended to the throne was to outlaw this practice.