My favorite skincare recommendation isn't retinol, sunscreen, or glycolic acid. It's Aqua Tofana, the poison used by wives in Italy to become widows in the 1600s. Back then, wives in Palermo and Rome had little recourse in abusive marriages, so a group of enterprising women bottled arsenic in anti-aging "cosmetic bottles" to avoid suspicion. Authorities apparently couldn’t fathom a makeup vial as the murder weapon that would go on, by some accounts, to liberate over 600 women from abusive marriages. Aqua Tofana, quite literally, helped fix a political problem: the lack of women’s rights in the 1600s.
While we are worlds away from the 1600s, not much has changed in how beauty—or, rather, the pursuit of it—is perceived.