I recently read an interesting article about Victorian beauty standards and methods, which turns out to be pretty wacky.
If you don’t know (I certainly didn’t!) the Victorian era (roughly between 1830 and 1900) had some really weird ideas on how to get the perfect figure and look for women. Here is a quote that really threw me:
‘The ideal of the time was modeled after those afflicted by consumption—that is, tuberculosis. Pale skin, dilated eyes, rosy cheeks, crimson lips, and a meagre and fragile figure.’ — Atlas Obscura
The ‘Consumption’ Beauty Look
I found the above to be fascinating, and find beauty standards throughout history to be an interesting topic. For example, in much earlier times, a good figure for a woman was a plump and curvy one, as it showed you were rich enough to afford good food and enough of it, so that era’s beauty standard was itself a class status thing. I’m not sure what was going on with those Victorians and their ‘consumption beauty look’ but I suppose that time in history had rather an enormous fascination and preoccupation with death in general (probably because everyone was dying a whole heap and whole lot younger than we are used to today. Grim!).
Bathing in Arsenic for Beauty!
Here is another quote from the same Atlas Obscura article describing some creepy Victorian beauty habits:
‘From swallowing ammonia to bathing in arsenic—which they knew to be poisonous— to using figure-molding corsets in a quest for the “perfect” 16-inch waist, there was no limit to what fashionable Victorians would do.’
The Tapeworm Diet
And the most crazy:
‘Most of these practices have, thankfully, gone out of style. There is one gruesome dietary idea, however, that has managed to survive—the tapeworm diet. The idea is simple, and gross. You take a pill containing a tapeworm egg. Once hatched, the parasite grows inside of the host, ingesting part of whatever the host eats. In theory, this enables the dieter to simultaneously lose weight and eat without worrying about calorie intake.’
‘Once the desired weight was achieved, to get rid of the now-unnecessary parasite, dieters would employ the same methods as those unwillingly afflicted by the worms. In Victorian England, this included pills or special devices. One such invention, created by Dr. Meyers of Sheffield, attempted to lure the tapeworm by inserting a cylinder with food via the digestive tract. It comes as no surprise that many patients choked to death before the tapeworm was successfully removed. Other folk cures prescribed holding a glass of milk at the end of either orifice and waiting for the tapeworm to come out.’
So it is all pretty crazy, right? Also, obviously, there is no evidence the milk thing actually worked. Obviously.
But here is the thing … no one is actually sure if any of the Victorian tapeworm diet stuff is even true! And this is where history always gets murky and muddy. The tapeworm diet pills were certainly advertised and sold, and also consumed … so victorian women were definitely open to the idea of swallowing a worm for their figure …
BUT the question now being asked is whether the pills being sold really even had tapeworms in them? Or, as some historians argue, were they just a scam and placebo?
No one seems to know for certain, which is interesting, because this era wasn’t even that long ago. It really shows you how much of history we know to be true may actually be a distortion of the facts, or a best guess.
Either way, I found this story pretty fascinating. You can read the whole article here if you are so inclined.
The above is taken from one of my older newsletters, so sign up to my newsletter below, if you like this sort of very weird thing! (I also talk about books and writing too!)
PJ Nwosu
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PJ Nwosu writes dark mystery novels set in epic fantasy worlds.
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