Grapefruit on elbows, gasoline on split ends — my friends and I did it all, and (barely) lived to tell the tale.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
"The cultivation of beauty is an art, just as the singing of a song or the painting of a fine picture," beauty expert Susanne Cocroft advised in her 1915 book Beauty, A Duty: The Art of Keeping Young. And being beautiful, she wrote, "is largely a matter of knowing how."
Beauty experts around the turn of the century recommended some truly strange things, like frequent bathing of the eyeballs, or using gasoline shampoo to cleanse the scalp. But I've always wondered if maybe they weren't all complete nonsense — so I decided to recruit a few friends and try some out.
I gathered beauty and exercise tips from old magazines and newspapers like The LA Times and The Washington Post. I also tested out beauty books like the 1914 My Secrets of Beauty by Lina Cavalieri (above), a prima donna opera singer who was also known as the "most famous living beauty," and the 1858 Arts of Beauty by the notorious dancer Lola Montez. Newspapers called her "a tigress" and "the very comet of her sex."
And who could refuse the opportunity to become a tigress sex comet? I invited some friends over to discover these lost secrets of beauty. Here's what we tried:
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