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Podcast: New Books in Popular Culture
Episode: Margarette Lincoln, "Perfection: 400 Years of Women's Quest for Beauty" (Yale UP, 2024)
Description: A colourful account of women's health, beauty, and cosmetic aids, from stays and corsets to today's viral trends.Victorian women ate arsenic to achieve an ideal, pale complexion, while in the 1790s balloon corsets were all the rage, designed to make the wearer appear pregnant. Women of the eighteenth century applied blood from a black cat's tail to problem skin, while doctors in the 1880s promoted woollen underwear to keep colds at bay. Beautification and the pursuit of health may seem all-consuming today, but their history is long and fantastically varied.Ranging across the last...