RENAISSANCE BEAUTY TIPS. Caution may cause undesirable side effects.

• Care of teeth. Rub with barley bread-crumbs browned with salt. To whiten teeth, grind up sage, nettle, flour, myrtle, rose buds, coriander, lemon pips, and pine cones. Steep in wine for three days. Boil with alum and rub on your teeth. FYI: Alum –  potassium aluminum sulfate – is used today in taxidermy to prevent rotting. It turns skin into a kind of leather.
• Removing unwanted hair.  Boil quicklime and arsenic sulfide. Test on a feather before applying to your legs. If the feather dissolves, the mixture is ready for use. Don’t leave it on too long. You did? Okay, treat burns with oil of roses.
• Make-up. For that fashionable white skin, apply ceruse (lead paste) to your face. Well yes, it may cause hair loss. But look at the positive side: you no longer need to go through the hassle of dying your hair.
• Bleaching your hair (a Lucrezia Borgia special). Add honey to the lees of white wine. Put on your hair and leave overnight. Then mix roots of celandine with oil of cumin seed and saffron. Leave paste on hair for 24 hours, wash off with ashes and lye of cabbage stalks.
• Bright eyes: A few drops of belladonna juice will do the trick, as long as you don’t mind the nausea, confusion, and hallucinations that go with it.  

       (Tips courtesy of polymath Giambattista della Porta)