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Hazardous History with Henry Winkler - Season 2 - Episode 02: Looks That Kill
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00:04Did you know there was a time when fixing your smile was like playing with dynamite?
00:11Your teeth could explode in your mouth.
00:14Of the most unpleasant things I could think of happening to a person, that's way up there.
00:19Or when your daily supplement drained the life out of you.
00:23There's no such thing as safe arsenic.
00:26That's like saying friendly swarm of murder hornets.
00:30Or when stylish new pajamas set the world on fire.
00:34So people would go to bed and they would just catch up like Roman candles.
00:38As with many of these things, it's two steps forward, one step back with a body count in the middle
00:44of it.
00:44These are the things we used to do.
00:46For fun.
00:48For money.
00:49Or maybe out of boredom.
00:51That we'll never see again.
00:54Were they dangerous?
00:55Certainly.
00:56Deadly?
00:58Occasionally.
00:58But boy, wasn't it exciting.
01:11Having a full head of healthy hair has always been stylish.
01:15And that was never more true than in the 1960s and 70s.
01:19And men who were balding would do just about anything to cover it up.
01:26Jim Morrison has long flowing locks.
01:30The Beatles are growing their hair out.
01:32My gosh, there's even a musical on Broadway called Hair.
01:36You did not want to be the bald guy in the singles bar.
01:38You wanted to have that full head of rich hair.
01:40So if God didn't give you that, you were going to do whatever you could to make it look like
01:44you did.
01:44There was nothing subtle about it.
01:46But men felt they needed to have a thick, luscious mane of hair on their heads.
01:54The idea of having a hairpiece is much more widely accepted.
01:58In the 60s and 70s, men are buying hairpieces like never before.
02:03And some of the most famous heads in Hollywood are crowned in fake hair.
02:09The problem is, toupees at the time are often unruly and unreliable.
02:14Any good toupee was made from real human hair woven into a flesh-colored mesh.
02:19And it was attached using a form of cement, which had its own problems because the toupee would get hot.
02:25It's like you're gluing this thing to your head.
02:28And if you start to sweat, maybe it falls off.
02:30These things are super expensive.
02:33And because they're prone to flying off, you got to worry about getting laughed at after spending a fortune.
02:39There were running jokes about it on the Carol Burnett show, on Match Game.
02:46This became like a big part of joke culture.
02:49But a breakthrough from World War II is about to be repurposed for the human head.
02:55Scientists during the Second World War realized that plastic can be extruded and spun out like a fine thread
03:04that can be woven into a rope for parachute cables and parachute scraps.
03:11So now the technology exists to take plastic and turn it into gossamer thin strands.
03:19Strands very much like the hairs on our head.
03:25Instead of using an adhesive to make your toupee stay on your head,
03:30they would stitch these clumps of synthetic hair into your scalp.
03:35Synthetic hair transplants weren't the very first type of hair transplant.
03:39Prior to that, there were natural hair transplants,
03:41where they would take hair from the back of your head and replant it in the front of your head.
03:46Incredibly painful process.
03:48So with the synthetic hair, you're not moving hair.
03:51You're actually adding new stuff to the head.
03:53You can style it. You can put products in it.
03:55You don't have to worry about it getting blown off in the wind.
03:58You can go swimming with it on your head.
04:01It looks like the better solution than the toupee.
04:05By 1979, there are 30 clinics in America implanting synthetic hair into thousands of heads.
04:13But customers are getting a lot more than a new hairline.
04:17Stitching bundles of plastic hair into human heads.
04:21What could go wrong?
04:22It's essentially like plugging fishing line into your head.
04:26The material that is producing it contains an ingredient list that's a little bit alarming.
04:32People are willingly putting within a few inches of their brain petroleum, limestone, natural gas, and ammonia.
04:44Why on earth would you want that sewed into your head in bundles?
04:52The body knows something that's not right, and the immune system reacts to this synthetic hair.
04:57It can result in inflamed scalps and massive pain.
05:01The body rejects the fibers and in some cases pushing them right back out.
05:05In order to stop the infection from spreading, some people have to get part of their scalp removed.
05:11And one patient even finds a needle in his head.
05:15So by 1983, 10,000 victims of synthetic hair implants have been identified.
05:22Because of this, the FDA bans the synthetic hair implant as a medical device.
05:27It's the first time that the FDA ever banned a medical device.
05:33So we know that some people spared no expense to have more hair.
05:38But what if you had too much hair?
05:41In the 1920s, it's really the first time in America that women are allowed to bear their legs and arms.
05:48So they need to just get rid of all of this hair that we used to traditionally cover up with
05:53clothes.
05:53The grooming industry explodes with new razors, creams, and powders.
05:59Targeting body hair as an enemy that must be rooted out at any cost.
06:04It's a post-Darwin age, and the idea of evolution has really taken hold.
06:08There's this almost subliminal message that says body hair is kind of a throwback.
06:12It almost makes you seem primitive and unhygienic.
06:16Ads at the time talked about hair in this brutal way, like,
06:19You need not be embarrassed by it. It's disfiguring. It must be banished.
06:23People have really put their brains to this issue.
06:26Developing new ways to get rid of hair.
06:29And they've come up with some very sadistic solutions.
06:33So there's hair removal creams.
06:35Those will have things like sulfur in them, which actually can give you chemical burns.
06:39There are even gloves that are sandpaper gloves that they use to rub the hair off.
06:43And then in 1924, German-American doctor Albert C. Geiser gets a bright idea.
06:50Dr. Geiser is a successful doctor in New York.
06:54And he sees this burgeoning hair removal fashion trend and sees an opportunity.
07:01He harnesses a technology he's very familiar with.
07:05X-rays.
07:07One of the things that Dr. Geiser notices is that wherever you use x-rays, the hair tends to go
07:11away.
07:12To him, hair loss isn't a bug in the system.
07:15It's a feature.
07:16And in 1924, he launches the Trico system.
07:21It's this metal tube.
07:22It's got a hole in it.
07:23And what you do is you line up whatever part of your body is too hairy.
07:27So say it's your armpit or your chin or whatever.
07:29You put it up against that hole.
07:31And x-rays inside the machine hit you.
07:34And eventually, your hair just falls out.
07:36By 1925, Geiser leases Trico to 75 other businesses and treats 200,000 formerly hairy clients.
07:45Unlike today, where you need a ton of safety training to work with x-rays, there is no certification needed.
07:51So anybody who owns a salon can order one of these things and then just start booking appointments.
07:56Wherever unwanted hair pops up, it's going to get zapped.
08:00So people are getting bombarded with radiation all over their bodies, their cheeks, their armpits, their sensitive areas.
08:08And the people zapping them have no idea what they're doing.
08:11Salons are treating this like it's a hair dryer.
08:13But each time you're doing that, you're getting 12 times the radiation you would get if you just went in
08:18a hospital today and no one's wearing a lead vest.
08:21People at this time do not really understand x-ray technology.
08:25So you have people exposing parts of their body to full x-ray blasts for several minutes at a time.
08:31And after 15 x-rays, the hair is gone.
08:37The Trico system isn't this pain-free cosmetic wonder system that makes you look better.
08:43It's just a ray gun shooting electromagnetic radiation at your face.
08:48So people begin seeing real problems.
08:51In 1930, an article is published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
08:55It talks about a person, she was a client of the Trico system, and still two years later, she's got
09:01burns on her face.
09:02And it shows that there's a risk.
09:04And the journal notes that she is the 20th case of people who use the system who are showing these
09:09symptoms.
09:10Dr. Geiser is hit with a series of lawsuits, and soon he has no choice but to shutter his business.
09:16After the lawsuits ends his business, Dr. Geiser is hit with something even more serious and ironic.
09:23When Dr. Geiser passes away in 1940, he's got cancer that he developed from using his own machine.
09:31These days, unwanted hair is handled with lasers or electrolysis and x-rays?
09:39They're performed by a trained technician, not the person who also waxes your legs.
09:47In the lifelong pursuit of looking good, one of the hardest phases is adolescence.
09:54Acne, growth spurts, bad haircuts.
09:57It's a gauntlet of embarrassments.
09:59And perhaps the most traumatic rite of passage?
10:02Braces.
10:03Right here, when I was 13.
10:07We all know that few humans are born with perfect, straight teeth.
10:11For generations, schoolchildren across this country have been forced to shut their mouths on school picture day.
10:19Modern orthodontia has been around since the early 20th century.
10:22But braces in the 50s and 60s were super expensive.
10:27It was something like the equivalent of $16,000 in today's money.
10:32So most families couldn't afford it.
10:34It was the number one thing you heard parents complaining about.
10:36Oh, God, what if this kid needs braces?
10:39Like, you never even heard about college.
10:41It was like, how am I going to afford braces on this kid?
10:43But in the 1970s, a new corporate perk changes teenage smiles across America.
10:49In the 1970s, employers decide that they can't give their employees a raise, but they can provide something else.
10:58Dental insurance.
11:00With insurance, braces are now in reach for a lot more kids.
11:04And before you know it, it seems like just about everybody's got a metal mouth.
11:08Like a lot of kids in America, I wore braces.
11:11Braces become a part of the universal teen experience.
11:15Everyone had braces.
11:17Everyone ended up having retainers.
11:18Everyone threw their retainers in a garbage can at one point and then had to go retrieve them from a
11:23garbage can.
11:24And if you had the old railroad tracks to fix your smile, it came at a painful price.
11:30These early braces are pretty much a torture device.
11:34They are metal brackets attached to individual teeth connected by stiff wires,
11:39which your orthodontist tightens to loosen and twist your teeth.
11:44First, you have the trauma of the installation.
11:46Then you get the pleasure of the pain of the regular tightening.
11:51And finally, you get to walk around class all day with food stuck in your teeth.
11:57It's slow torture, but it's what you can't see or feel that's even more dangerous.
12:02When the early pioneers are trying to figure out what materials to use, one metal that gets used a lot
12:07is cadmium.
12:08Cadmium is awesome because it has a low melting point.
12:11So you can use it to easily melt and then harden to attach things together.
12:16Cadmium is the same stuff that they use in batteries.
12:20Think about putting a battery in your mouth for three to four years and just sucking on it the entire
12:25time.
12:25You're causing liver problems, bone problems.
12:27So it's solving a cosmetic issue for the most part and creating really serious lifelong health issues.
12:34Well, what happens when you're the kid who has the kind of teeth where metal in your mouth isn't enough?
12:40Dentists create a new humiliation for you.
12:43And overbite, meaning your teeth go over, is when the upper jaw grows quicker than the lower jaw.
12:50Overbites create this Bugs Bunny effect that junior high bullies really revel in.
12:57In 1953, an orthodontist improves a contraption to correct this called the face bow.
13:05This is the birth of the much-made fun of headgear.
13:09Finding out you were going to have to get headgear was a nightmare.
13:11No, you've got the braces, then you've got sort of these things come out and attach it.
13:15I remember one kid in my class, he had like the blue straps around his head.
13:19So he literally had this medical appliance.
13:21It's like, ah, he's not getting a date to the dance.
13:23He's the headgear guy.
13:25By the mid-1980s, orthodontists are prescribing millions of these headgear appliances.
13:32They're everywhere, and it sort of feels like a social experiment.
13:36Anybody who was unlucky enough to have to wear headgear when they were growing up
13:39knows that they got relentlessly teased.
13:42But the one thing that was worse than the teasing was the way these things could fail.
13:47The danger of this apparatus is it's held together by firmly pulled rubber bands.
13:53These rubber bands are tight and strong enough to move teeth embedded in your skull.
13:59That's a lot of tension.
14:01If you turn your neck the wrong way or if you sneeze, they could let loose and turn the face
14:09bow into a crossbow.
14:11Now, if you're lucky, you just get smacked in the back of the head.
14:13But if you're not lucky, you get a sharp metal wire in your eye.
14:18Plus, that wire, by the way, is coated in your saliva, and so it's full of bacteria, and you're bound
14:22to get an infection if you don't go blind.
14:24In 1985, a teen turned over in their sleep, their headgear dislodged from their mouth and stabbed them in the
14:32eye, causing permanent vision damage.
14:35You got to remember, too, this is long before the age of anti-bullying campaigns, so it is just open
14:40season in school.
14:41So if you have bad teeth, or if you have braces, or God forbid, if you have headgear, you just
14:48got to take it.
14:48To make yourself a stinky mouth social pariah for your most formative years, I think I'd rather take the crooked
14:55teeth.
14:56By the 2000s, safer metals are used in braces, and headgear gets less medieval.
15:02So they basically make them with breakaway straps, so that if anything's going to pop off, it's not going to
15:07hit you in the eye.
15:08If you think braces were bad when you were a kid, wait till you hear what people did to get
15:14perfect teeth 200 years ago.
15:18Today, dentures are seen as something that only older people would wear, but back in the day, it was kind
15:23of something that everybody was doing.
15:25In the 1800s, there's really no sense of dental hygiene, so a lot of people are having tooth issues.
15:31Most dentures are made out of ivory, so they're very expensive, and essentially only really for the wealthy.
15:37Ivory is so costly, people will go to any lengths to find denture alternatives.
15:44It's June of 1815 on the battlefield at Waterloo.
15:47Napoleon is on his rise.
15:49This is the big battle between he and the coalition forces.
15:52Around 40,000 people die, and looters take anything that's of value.
15:56One of the things that was of value was the men's teeth, because they can be turned into dentures.
16:01So much so, that dentures for years afterwards were referred to as Waterloo teeth.
16:07It's really gross.
16:08There's got to be a line.
16:10They said George Washington had wooden teeth, and then some people said he might have actually had a horse tooth
16:15or two.
16:16I don't know whether teeth from a horse or a dead soldier would be better.
16:21Neither seem like a good idea.
16:24The cadaver dentures look lifelike, but they're death for your health and well-being.
16:30The problem with using the human teeth is because they're not soaked into the bone anymore, they do slowly get
16:35more brittle.
16:37They start to break off.
16:38So if you've ever wondered if a dead guy's teeth can still get cavities, the answer is yes.
16:43The dead guy's tooth that you've been chewing with breaks loose, and you swallow along with your beef, you swallow
16:50the dead guy's tooth.
16:52There's nothing good about that.
16:55Dentists search for a way to hold false teeth in place more firmly.
16:59And in the late 1800s, the Industrial Revolution gives them the answer.
17:04In 1868, an inventor named John Wesley Hyatt came up with something called celluloid.
17:12It can be melted and formed in different shapes.
17:15You can color it.
17:17So celluloid quickly becomes the go-to material for making people's dentures.
17:22But it turns out that these celluloid dentures have a drawback.
17:26The base material, nitrocellulose, is what gunpowder is made from.
17:31Say you're chewing something, and your teeth happen to brush up against each other just right, it is possible your
17:37teeth could explode in your mouth.
17:40Of the most unpleasant things I could think of happening to a person, that's way up there.
17:46In 1875, the New York Times writes an article about the risk, and they call it explosive teeth.
17:51And that tells everybody maybe this isn't such a good idea.
17:54Yeah, celluloid teeth are replaced in the 1930s by acrylic teeth.
17:59Thank goodness.
18:00Today, dentures are thoroughly tested.
18:04They are not made from dead people's teeth, and they don't have a gunpowder component.
18:09Thanks to modern medicine, losing all your teeth is no longer a normal part of life.
18:14And neither is borrowing somebody else's.
18:19There was a time when having a starched collar was a must for men.
18:24And if you didn't, you weren't stylish.
18:27But if it was too stiff, well, that was a whole other fashion emergency.
18:33Keeping your crisp collar clean in the 1800s is a difficult job.
18:38In the city streets, horses kick up dust.
18:41There's mud everywhere, and most men only own two or three shirts at a time.
18:47And so in a moment of great ingenuity or perhaps uncontrolled rage, this woman in Troy, New York, Hannah Montague,
18:55is so sick of washing her husband's shirts all the time just to get the collar clean that she cuts
19:00it off.
19:02So now she can just wash that piece, takes basically no time, and then reattach it to the shirt each
19:07day.
19:08I mean, it's such a great idea.
19:10So a local businessman takes her idea and decides to market a detachable collar, reattaches the shirt with studs, and
19:18it seems like a no-brainer.
19:21The detachable collar is not only easier to clean, it's easier to get stiffer and higher.
19:27And this was a symbol of propriety and dignity, and brands are trying to outdo each other.
19:36It escalates to the point that there are collars that are three inches high that go, like, right under your
19:42chin.
19:43One company, Arrow, they have an ad campaign starring the Arrow Collar Man.
19:47And this guy is such a heartthrob that women are actually writing him letters.
19:52But then, wearing this sexy new status symbol takes a turn.
19:56In 1888, a shocking story is printed in the New York Times.
20:01There's a man found on a park bench.
20:03He's leaning forward.
20:04His face is completely black.
20:06It looks like he's been strangled.
20:08After a night of drinking, he attempts to stumble home, takes a rest on a park bench, passes out, and
20:16leans forward.
20:17The police investigation determines that he was strangled to death by his own collar.
20:23This collar was killing people, like Cujo, around your neck.
20:27But still, people wore the collars.
20:29You see more and more examples of men being found strangled by their own collar.
20:34So, the media, ever desirous of trying to come up with catchy names, they call these collars father killers.
20:41Despite the choking hazards, detachable collars are popular well into the 20th century.
20:47I think that the people that kept wearing the collars were confident in their ability to wear a shirt collar
20:54without dying.
20:56And I think that's the least we can expect from ourselves.
20:59Eventually, what dooms the detachable collar is the change in fashions and new technologies.
21:06After World War I, a more casual look is embraced, and you've got time-saving devices, like washing machines, which
21:15make doing your laundry less of a chore.
21:17It just shows you how powerful fashion is.
21:21People are still choosing to risk getting asphyxiated, then miss out on the latest trend.
21:28Who knew that in the 1800s, dressing up could actually kill you?
21:32And in the 1950s, dressing down could be equally dangerous.
21:38Today, your pajamas are for comfort.
21:41They're not for style.
21:42But in the post-wear era, it becomes sort of a thing where it's glamour.
21:46You want to look fashionable inside your house.
21:49That is the new trend.
21:50And that means fashionable pajamas.
21:53In 1953, there's a young man in Chicago who takes this idea of lounging to the extreme.
21:59His name is Hugh Hefner of Playboy magazine.
22:02The guy made the wearing of pajamas acceptable in society.
22:07I mean, if I can live my life in silk pajamas with a smoking jacket, why of society have we
22:14decided that this is the way to go?
22:16We should all be in pajamas right now.
22:19Besides being more fashionable, there's something else driving the pajama boom in the 1950s.
22:25The fabric itself.
22:26In the 1930s, 90% of American silk actually comes from Japan.
22:30So that completely stops when World War II hits the country.
22:34So Americans need another fabric to make pajamas out of.
22:37And the answer is rayon.
22:39Rayon is a synthetic fabric that's spun from wood pulp and mimics silk.
22:44It's actually initially known as artificial silk.
22:47Rayon looks like silk.
22:49It feels like silk.
22:50And it's available at a fraction of the cost.
22:52By the early 1950s, the rayon industry just won $100 million in annual sales.
22:59And millions of Americans are wearing it to bed.
23:02But as rayon rises, it collides with another booming trend.
23:09In the 1950s, smoking is very common.
23:1360% of men are smokers.
23:1530% of women, they do it from the time they wake up to the time they go to sleep.
23:19And rayon essentially is a form of paper, and it burns like paper.
23:25So people would go to bed, they'd get in with their wife or husband, they'd light up a cigarette,
23:30and then the ashes of the burnt tip would fall, and they would just catch up like Roman candles.
23:35After this happens a lot, rayon gets a reputation.
23:37They start to call it flaming pajamas.
23:40By the mid-1970s, regulators come down hard on flammable sleepwear.
23:45Pajamas must now be fire-resistant.
23:48They don't outlaw rayon pajamas.
23:51That would kill a whole industry.
23:53Instead, they figure out a way around the danger.
23:56Let's douse these pajamas in a flame-retardant chemical called treese.
24:01It works so well that they're like, man, let's make pajamas for the kids now with this stuff.
24:06In the 1970s, they start advertising pajamas with big labels like fire-resistant or fire-retardant.
24:13And it might seem strange to, like, really play up the fire-retardancy of your clothes,
24:18but if you're a person who grew up in the 1950s with your pajamas catching on fire all the time,
24:22it's actually quite a necessary thing.
24:25The only problem with treese is it soaks into your skin and kills you.
24:30So there's this UC Berkeley scientist named Arlene Blum.
24:34She discovers that the chemical that these companies are putting on rayon garments to make them flame-retarded
24:40is closely related to a chemical used in pesticides that causes cancer and infertility.
24:47So, as with many of these things, it's two steps forward, one step back, with a body count in the
24:53middle of it.
24:55After research comes out, federal regulators immediately ban treese-treated kids' sleepwear.
25:01And then soon after that, they end up seizing all the sleepwear around the country.
25:06These days, pajamas are made from safer materials like cotton and polyester.
25:12It's one less thing keeping us up at night.
25:17If it means looking better, people often turn a blind eye to their own safety.
25:22But in the 1800s, if you wanted to look really great, it could cost you two blind eyes.
25:30In the 19th century, there's this thing called the Grand Tour.
25:33It is a classical tour of Europe for wealthy young men.
25:37Charles Dickens and Mark Twain and even the Vanderbilts all do it.
25:41You start in France, and then you go to Switzerland, and then it ends in Italy.
25:44Many of these men write poetry and odes to the Italian women's beautiful dark eyes, and they call them belladonnas,
25:52or beautiful women.
25:54So the men come home from tour, and they have developed a taste for this dark, sultry look, these dark
26:02eyes.
26:03And the women are like, well, we've got to deliver, right?
26:07So pharmacies start selling something called the belladonna eye drop.
26:16One drop of this belladonna eye drop in each eye, your eyes become inky and dark and infinitely appealing.
26:23By the mid-1800s, apothecaries in London, Paris, and New York are selling belladonna eye drops over the counter.
26:31These eye drops dilate your pupils, so they don't actually change the color of the iris.
26:36They just open up the pupils, so it looks like you have these big, dark eyes.
26:40The problem is the berry they're using to make these eye drops is actually a form of nightshade, which is
26:46a well-known poison.
26:48The Romans poisoned their arrows with nightshade to make them extra deadly.
26:53So even though people know that nightshade is dangerous, it's the 1890s.
26:58There's no regulators out there.
26:59You can just walk out in the forest and grab some berries and make some eye drops and have women
27:04feeling beautiful.
27:06The thing about belladonna is that it's such a powerful poison that you use belladonna eye drops,
27:11and they're going to dilate your pupils sometimes for weeks.
27:14To protect your vision, if you stare at the sun or something bright, your pupils are going to close down.
27:21But if you use belladonna eye drops, it's stopping that process.
27:25So your eyes are beautiful.
27:26They're just not functioning properly.
27:29This would be like driving down the road and being hit with somebody's high beams the entire time.
27:35Women who use these eye drops start to experience headaches and dizziness.
27:39They start getting really sick.
27:40They start having blurry vision.
27:42And in the most severe cases, some women actually start to go blind.
27:47Ultimately, the nightshade family are neurotoxins, and they do damage to pretty much every system in the body.
27:54So eye drops with chronic use can cause blindness, coma, even death.
28:00Regulation takes belladonna off the shelves in 1938.
28:04But the name lives on.
28:07Today, when you go to the eye doctor and they give you those drops that are meant to dilate your
28:12pupils,
28:12that's actually a synthetic form of nightshade named after these women.
28:18I think it's a strange rebranding of fundamentally a poison.
28:22But I guess it's like a little joke you can share next time you're at the eye doctor.
28:26If you think eye drops in the 1800s were risky, you won't believe what people were doing to their skin.
28:34Beginning in the 1800s, cities are expanding rapidly, but sanitation is non-existent.
28:41This is an environment rife for tuberculosis.
28:45It becomes a popular look to have pale skin, and that pale skin provides a powerful contrast to red lips.
28:52And that becomes the look.
28:54And that's brought to you by tuberculosis.
28:57Oddly enough, the pallor, the fainting, the vulnerability, these all play into an already established ideal of femininity.
29:05So cosmetics manufacturers, they're going to figure out how to sell you things that are going to make you look
29:10that way.
29:11Chemists realize they can help women get that pale and vulnerable look without all the baggage of tuberculosis.
29:18The beauty and fashion industry is trying to really capitalize on this, and they make this thing that makes you
29:25look pale called complexion wafers.
29:29Complexion wafers come in a little box, and you can chew them up, sort of like Flintstone vitamins.
29:34And the promise is you chew a few of these a day, and you will have porcelain-like skin.
29:40So women start taking these wafers.
29:42The wildest thing is they actually work.
29:45By the 1890s, complexion wafers are a bestseller.
29:51They're commonly found on women's dressers next to eyeshadow and rouge.
29:55The complexion wafers really do work, but that's because the key ingredient is a rat poison called arsenic.
30:04Of course it's going to make you pale. It's poison.
30:08The wafers at one point are so popular, they even make it into the Sears catalog.
30:12Imagine, they're between the trousers and the wheelbarrows.
30:16If you take a closer look at the advertising for these products, the manufacturers use words like,
30:22safe for everyday consumption.
30:24They're making a point that this isn't dangerous.
30:28The thing is, by the 1890s, everybody knows that arsenic's bad for you,
30:31and yet people keep popping these wafers, and nobody is stopping it from being sold.
30:35I mean, it says arsenic right on the label.
30:38It's called Dr. Campbell's Safe Arsenic Complexion Wafers.
30:42There's no such thing as safe arsenic.
30:45That's like saying friendly swarm of murder hornets.
30:48What the arsenic is doing is killing your red blood cells,
30:51which is to say, like, killing your life force.
30:55Arsenic doesn't just attack your blood vessels.
30:58It also attacks your nervous system.
30:59So you get these worse symptoms, like you get jittery, you get really weak.
31:03And over time, some people end up getting cancer and even dying.
31:08Who knew that achieving a deathly look just involve actually trying to slowly kill yourself?
31:13By 1931, the government actually seizes the final remaining units
31:18of Dr. Campbell's Safe Arsenic Complexion Wafers
31:21and charges the company with false advertising
31:23because it's the falsest of advertising.
31:27Once modern science arrived, looking like death warmed over
31:31was suddenly out of fashion.
31:36Remember watching old movies set in the 1800s, like Gone with the Wind,
31:40where the women had parasols and wide skirts and tiny waists?
31:45They looked elegant, but dressing that way had a downside.
31:50For all of American history, women have been trying to transform their bodies
31:54to meet the latest, most fashionable shape.
31:56Very often, that means getting a slimmer waist.
31:59Today, it's through GLP-1s.
32:02In the 80s and 90s, there were, like, diet pills.
32:05But back in the day, it was corsets.
32:11A corset is a cone-shaped harness that is wrapped around your body
32:15and is laced as tight as possible through a process called tight lacing.
32:19Not only does it show off feminine curves,
32:23it shows that you've got a restraint.
32:26It shows that you're in control.
32:28It shows that you are disciplined enough to wear effectively a torture device.
32:35By the 1860s, the industrialization of steel brings corsets to the masses.
32:41Steel corsets can squeeze the width of an average woman's waist
32:45down a whopping six to eight inches.
32:48And nearly every woman in Europe and North America wears one.
32:52This obsession with the small waist gets really intense.
32:56Children are wearing them.
32:57Even pregnant women are wearing them.
32:59One French dancer attracts people with her 14-inch waist.
33:03For comparison, 14 inches in circumference is about the size of a miniature dachshund.
33:09This is a very hazardous fashion trend.
33:14Extreme lacing can exert 40 to 50 pounds of pressure.
33:18Your heart and your lungs just can't expand against that.
33:21Turns out you can't smush your organs into different places
33:26because then your body starts breaking down.
33:29Beginning in the 1870s, doctors notice a string of mysterious deaths in young corseted women.
33:37The pressure is so intense that it can twist the ribs until they're folded over each other like shingles.
33:44To inhale, you have to expand your lungs and the corset is preventing you literally from breathing.
33:49It was such a common problem that doctors called the condition death by corset.
33:55By the turn of the 20th century, experts are finally calling for a ban.
33:59And eventually, women's fashion tosses the corset aside.
34:03By the early 20th century, the new woman is arriving.
34:07This is a woman who is riding bicycles in bloomers, who is advocating for suffrage,
34:13who is a few years from being a flapper with rising hemlines and short skirts,
34:17and she's not about to be bound up by a corset.
34:22Believe it or not, corsets were only half the equation for achieving that Scarlett O'Hara look in the 1800s.
34:29Below the waist, there was even more trouble brewing.
34:34Before the 1800s, to achieve this fashionable, billowing skirt look that was so popular,
34:38you had to layer petticoats.
34:40Petticoats are essentially underskirts, and you had to have four or five.
34:44That achieves that shape, but it's obviously really hot,
34:48and it adds a lot of weight, in some cases up to 20 pounds of extra weight.
34:52There's this breakthrough in the 1800s called crinoline.
34:55And it's like a cage that will hold up a dress to give it this big, beautiful sort of flowing
35:01and very opulent and fancy look.
35:04By 1860, crinoline factories churn out thousands every day.
35:09Steel crinolines cause skirts to balloon 50% on average,
35:13from four feet across, 12 feet around, to six feet across, 18 feet around.
35:20Imagine you have the steel cage around you that's the size of a small car, essentially.
35:25They just keep getting bigger and bigger.
35:27That is the same shape and size as the capsule that John Glenn took into orbit.
35:32It's funny that we go to a fashion trend that makes our fashion larger than our hallways and our doorways.
35:39They seem ridiculous.
35:41But beyond their absurd size, these skirts pose a more serious problem.
35:46There's no electricity yet, so everywhere you turn, there's an open flame.
35:50If you think about how big these dresses really are, you can't see the edges of everything.
35:55You don't have mirrors on where you can see the back.
35:57Suddenly, you're just having a nice conversation with a boy from the town over,
36:02and your whole dress is on fire.
36:05By the middle 19th century, 3,000 people die in England alone from crinoline fires.
36:12Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the famous poet, crinoline fire kills his wife.
36:17Two sisters of the writer Oscar Wilde die in crinoline fires.
36:21You'd think after the first one or two, people are like, I don't know.
36:25These things catch fire pretty easily.
36:26No, no, 3,000.
36:28And they still use this dangerous fire hazard.
36:31It's only changing lifestyles that eventually brings an end to gargantuan crinoline skirts.
36:39Crinoline is eventually replaced by the bustle, which is really just kind of giving more of a shape to the
36:45rear.
36:46Now, women can still make a big statement, and they don't have to burn the room down to do it.
36:54In the 40s, some women ditch the skirt entirely, joining the war effort with a radical new look.
37:01Pants.
37:04Do you remember when nobody talked about sunscreen and people would do just about anything for a deep golden tan?
37:13And if the sun couldn't do it fast enough, the normal way, well, somebody was bound to come up with
37:19an abnormal way.
37:22Post-World War II America is a time of expanded prosperity, especially in the growing middle and upper classes.
37:28You get new status symbols, like the ability to enjoy leisure time, vacation.
37:33And so a tan becomes a symbol that you can afford to enjoy life's spoils.
37:37So people like John F. Kennedy are out there like symbols of youthfulness, and he's like sailing in the open
37:44waters with this beautiful tan, and people want to look like that.
37:49But most people can't afford to jet off to the tropics for a quick tan tune-up.
37:54And German engineer Friedrich Wolff sees an opportunity.
37:59Friedrich Wolff becomes the father of the fake bake.
38:01He realizes that UV lights, which had been used in medicine for therapeutic reasons, can also be used to tan
38:08the skin.
38:09And so Wolff invents something that makes tanning available year-round and inside.
38:15The sunbed.
38:17This new innovation pops up in malls, gyms, salons.
38:21They're everywhere.
38:22The big flex becomes the off-season power tan.
38:26If you can walk through the office or go to your PTA meeting, and you're sporting this power tan in
38:31the middle of winter, that's the status symbol.
38:34It works.
38:3520 minutes at the local strip mall, and you come out looking like you were at the French Riviera.
38:39In the 80s, indoor tanning becomes the fastest-growing business in America, soaring 300% in five years.
38:48But doctors are less sunny on the future of tanning beds.
38:53Almost immediately, studies come out linking UV radiation to wrinkles, burns, melanoma.
38:59People now realize that the sun was dangerous, and now the thing that they thought was safer, the tanning bed,
39:05is also dangerous, but they still want their tan.
39:09Tanning beds aren't as hot, but no doctor could predict what they would come up with next.
39:15Advertisements start to roll out, promising you a rich, dark tan.
39:21One that requires no time in the sun, and you're going to look good, you're going to have a tan
39:25all year round.
39:26It's a tan in a pill.
39:29Tanning pills seem like the perfect solution for getting bronze, without burning off your skin.
39:35By the mid-1980s, they are selling out at health stores across America.
39:40When tanning pills come out, they are not regulated as if they are a pharmaceutical, so everybody assumes that these
39:46are safe.
39:46However, there's an unexpected effect of these pills.
39:49The result is not quite what people are looking for.
39:52Instead of that French Riviera bronze, it's more like Halloween pumpkin.
39:59It turns out that the pills aren't some kind of synthetic superchemical that people created.
40:05It's a naturally occurring chemical, which is related to beta carotene, the chemical in carrots, for example.
40:12It's the same stuff that will make a shrimp and a flamingo pink.
40:17Now, when you think of a healthy tan, does your mind ever go to flamingos, shrimp, or carrots?
40:23No way!
40:25Each of these pills is going to contain about 30 milligrams, and you're taking four of those a day.
40:29It's like you're eating a huge amount of carrots, but you'd have to eat 10 to 15 pounds of carrots
40:35to do the equivalent of these little pills.
40:37Of course people are turning orange.
40:40But your embarrassing color is the least of your problems.
40:44When you have so much of something in your system that your system's not used to, it goes somewhere.
40:50One of the places it tends to go is in your eyeballs.
40:53It crystallizes inside your retinas, so people see blurred vision and sparkling.
40:59The most serious problem with the pigment is that it stops the growth of bone marrow, which produces red and
41:05white blood cells.
41:06In one case, this doctor sees this really sick 20-year-old who's been taking these pills, and she's got
41:13bruises all over her.
41:15Her skin is this kind of sickly orange.
41:16And unfortunately, she dies a few weeks later.
41:21Finally, the FDA does step in, it bans the sale of these pills, and the fad goes away.
41:27The sun is free.
41:28Like, you could just go outside for 15 minutes, and the sun will do what it's been doing since the
41:35beginning of Earth, which is make you look good and healthy and tan.
41:37These people were like, nah, modern chemicals will get it.
41:43Remembering the ways we tried to look our best, whether it was plastic hair implants or collars that choked us
41:50or even exploding teeth, the shortcuts we took weren't always easy on the eyes.
41:56But despite the perils, that's what made our hazardous history a sight to behold.
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