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)

GETTING RID OF UNWANTED GUESTS. Cruel fun in the Renaissance.

Here is the scenario: You can’t get around inviting your in-laws for dinner, but you want to make sure they leave really early. Follow the instructions of Giambattista della Porta, the Italian scientist known as the Professor of Secrets.

Sprinkle food with powdered leaves of cuckoo pine (arum), and your guests will start drooling copiously. Cut up harp strings and strew on hot meat. The little wires will writhe like worms and gross out your guests.

Breathe garlic on your female guests, and their make-up will yellow. Well, maybe that only works with Renaissance make-up made of white lead and mercury. In any case, breathing garlic on unwanted guests is always a good idea. 

Alternatively you could have some wicked fun with them.  A bit of belladonna dissolved in water will drive them temporarily insane. It is a most pleasant spectacle to behold their crazy whims and visions. Just don’t feed them too much belladonna, which will make them sleep for four days.

If your unwanted guests OD on belladonna and stay overnight, you may want to put extract of boiled chameleon into their bathwater and watch them turn green.

The Borgias, I understand, were more radical. They killed unwanted guests. Here is the recipe for the poison they used:

Catch a bear and make him swallow arsenic. He will start foaming at the mouth. Collect the foam on a silver plate. Bottle and use as needed.

Not sure I could handle the bear part. Besides, am I missing something here? Why didn’t they give the arsenic directly to their guests?