To be beautiful you need to suffer.

Nowadays more and more people tend to adhere kind of standards of beauty. Everyone wants to attract attention and cause envy or admiration of others. Thousands of women and men do not cease to swallow packets of suspicious pills for weight loss and torment themselves questionable diets, try fashionable practice of plastic surgery, giving a kind of silly tribute to the community and the notorious stamp like 90-60-90. Some of them even have no idea of the danger threatening their organism.

Lead in lipstick, mercury in your mascara. Recent headlines about harmful ingredients hiding in beauty products are enough to make even the vainest among people want to go back to the good old days of rubbing strawberries on lips to make them red. But women and men have plastered a lot more than berry juice onto their skin in the never-ending quest to look hot or extremely pallid, as was usually the case back in the day. Some beauty products of yesteryear contained high concentrations of lead, mercury, arsenic, even radiation, thanks to ignorance, indifference and narcissism. For as long as humans have admired themselves in magazines, mirrors and murky pools of water, they’ve also had to contend with the ugly side of beauty.

Actually, suffering for beauty has ancient roots. Ancient Egyptians may have been the first to plaster on killer cosmetics. Their exaggerated eye makeup, which trumped even the late Tammy Faye, was made of malachite, a green ore of copper, galena, lead sulfide, and, most famously, kohl, a paste made of soot, fatty matter and metal (usually lead, antimony, manganese or copper). Men and women in ancient Greece took things a step further by slathering lead not just around their eyes, but all over their face. Their white lead face cream, according to a 2001 article in the journal Clinics in Dermatology, was designed to “clear complexions of blemishes and to improve the color and texture of the skin” and was such a big hit that lead-based face masks soon became all the rage.

During the 16th century corsets were first worn and remained a feature of fashionable dress until the 1789 French Revolution. During the 1840s and 1850s tightlacing was first recorded. It was ordinary fashion taken to an extreme. Prolonged tightlacing has noticeable effects on the body. Internal organs are moved closer together and out of their original positions. The volume of the lungs diminishes and the tightlacer tends to breathe with the upper portion of the lungs only, creating a mucosal build-up that results in a chronic cough. The liver is pressed upwards. As it continually renews itself, it adapts to fit its new position, and in a long-term tightlacer it can develop ridges where it rests against the ribs. The compression of the stomach reduces its volume and causes indigestion, heartburn and constipation.

I’d also like to tell you about foot binding. It was a custom practiced on young girls and women for approximately one thousand years in China, beginning in the 10th century and ending in the early 20th century.

In Chinese foot binding, young girls’ feet were wrapped in tight bandages so that they could not grow and develop normally; they would, instead, break and become highly deformed, not growing past 4–6 inches. As the girl reached adulthood, her feet would remain small and prone to infection, paralysis, and muscular atrophy.

The custom is commonly cited by sociologists and anthropologists as an example of how immense human suffering can be inflicted in the pursuit of beauty.