We’ve lived through our fair share of, ahem, interesting beauty trends such as the barely-there eyebrows of the 90s and 00s, and may we never forget all the frosty makeup that we owned; but in comparison to years past, these trends are nothing. So buckle up because we’re looking at the craziest beauty trends throughout history. Let’s get started!
Unibrows Were all the Rage in Ancient Greece
(image via: makeup by barbz)
Eyebrow trends are interesting; we’ve seen brows overplucked, we’ve seen brows dramatic, we’ve seen them au natural, but in ancient Greece, it was all about the unibrow. A woman that had a unibrow was seen as intelligent and pure. And much like today if this look couldn’t be achieved naturally, then there was a way to achieve it somehow. Women would often draw their own unibrows on if they simply didn’t have enough hair, and some women went the extra mile and made brows out of goat’s hair or tree resin.
Short Tooth Lady
The Renaissance period woman is often remembered as having wide-set hips, a smaller waist, and longer legs; and when we look back on what they wore, we see that they inspired women’s fashion for years to come, but they had their fair share of bizarre beauty trends as well. Take short teeth for instance. During this time women simply thought short teeth were better; some would even go so far as to file them down.
Accentuate Those Veins
(image via: ny times)
The time period was pre-revolution France and pale skin was all the rage. Really pale skin meant that you could see veins, so what did women of the time start doing? You guessed it, coloring in those veins with blue pencil. Crazy to think in a world of self-tanning products that all women wanted at one time was to be as pale as possible. (Xanax)
Eyelashes Be Gone
During the Middle Ages, women thought their foreheads to be their absolute best features and they would do anything to accentuate them, which included removing their eyelashes. This is another beauty trend that seems wild to us now because whether it’s by way of a mascara or lash extensions, we’ll do anything for thick, full lashes.
Some Girls Just Can’t Hold Their Arsenic
(image via: the quack doctor)
So if we were told today that arsenic would give us perfect skin, we would have some reservations, as we should, however, back in the early 1900s, women were eating, yes EATING arsenic to even out their complexion and whiten their skin. Eventually, they learned that this was bad. Like, fatally bad, but there was definitely a time when a girl could buy arsenic wafers.
