A radiant (and radioactive) beauty

A radiant (and radioactive) beauty

A radiant (and radioactive) beauty

Medicine

The discovery of radium caused a sensation at the beginning of the 20th century, it was incorporated into cosmetic and medicinal products and caused serious health problems

Isabel Gómez Melenchón

Youth, beauty, health, virility... and radioactivity. Incredible as it may seem to us now, the first decades of the last century saw a radium boom that was not limited to scientific research, but rather filled bathroom cabinets with powders, creams, makeup, even lipsticks that promised a "glossy" shine. special" thanks to the powers of the recently discovered element, to which all the virtues that have been and have been attributed.

Fortunately most of those objects contained only a minimal amount of radium, if any, but others really delivered what they promised, not beauty, but radiation, and still pose a risk not only to museums today and collectors.

A curious gadget from a hundred years ago promised to revitalize manhood by applying it to the genitals: today it continues to emit radiation

A few years ago, while demolishing the house of a relative in the United States, a man found a strange object which, very wisely, he decided to take to the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, inside, even more wisely, a lead-lined box. It was a “Scrotal Radioendocrinator” manufactured in the 1920s and promised nothing less than restoring virility by irradiating the male parts…

The object remained in the museum until a curator, also wise but above all knowledgeable, subjected it to a Geiger counter, and when she saw the result, she called more experts. The Radioendocrinator might as well have been called the Terminator, because it kept emitting radioactivity. Finally, it ended up well buried in an atomic warehouse in the famous Area 51; if the aliens are really hiding there, they are served.

Gadgets to anticipate Viagra, beauty products, toys, comics starring The Radium Master and even a dance... The fever for radium seemed to have no limits. No doubt when Marie Sklodowska-Curie and her husband, Pierre Curie, discovered in 1898 what would become element 88 on the periodic table, they did not imagine that first the French and then the Americans would end up dancing just a few years later to the sound of the Radium Dance: Loie Muller, an American singer and dancer, premiered it in Paris around 1904; Critics highlighted his "absolutely luminous" tunic, which by a secret mechanism emits phosphorescent rays. Another chronicle narrates that the Curies, who came to see the show, said they had seen their discovery "in a new light", and Loie Muller herself (and clever) was quick to explain that her brilli-brilli was due to the fact that for the locker room radio had been used.

Possibly Loie Muller was exaggerating, given the prices that the material reached then, as indicated by the Curies, with whom she had established a good friendship, and it was Thomas Edison who helped her by creating phosphorescent salts that were spread on clothes; but the truth is that one of the uses of radium at that time, in addition to medical-health, was aesthetics and cosmetics.

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A radiant (and radioactive) beauty

Radium was not the only fashionable element, polonium was also on the page, also discovered by the Curies in 1898 and about which the current Russian secret services could talk a lot, and thorium, which although it had already been known since At the beginning of the 19th century, it was again the Curies who unraveled its radioactive properties. So much news about the Curies led to a conflict with the cosmetic company Thor-Radia over the use of their name for commercial purposes.

Thor-Radia translated the principle of hormesis into the use of a small amount of radium bromide added to a range of products ranging from toothpaste, cleansers, make-up, anti-wrinkle, day and night creams and a lipstick collection in twelve shades. Today we would put our hands to our heads before such an idea and the real danger that it entails, but it was not until the death of Marie Curie first and later of several researchers on her team that she became aware of the risks involved in manipulating radium, and We don't even talk about its ingestion anymore.

Radiation promised a revolution at all levels and it became fashionable, but nobody thought it was harmful

The commercials for Thor-Radio, the best known but not the only brand of what we will call radio cosmetics , highlighted the luminous properties of this element, by day similar to ordinary salt but capable of glowing in the dark. Likewise, the advertising posters highlighted these almost magical properties: a slightly angled shot shows the young blonde model, known as The Thor-Girli illuminated like an expressionist film. The model's "healthy glow", which one would call rather disturbing, was attributed by advertising to the irradiation of Thor-Radia products, with the added label of "Scientific Method of Beauty", and to curl the curl also in its label appeared the recommendation of a supposed scientist named Alfred Curie.

Actually, the creator of the mark was called Alexis Mousallis, but he was smart enough to convince a doctor named actually Alfred Curie, but who had never discovered anything, to use his name in a way that by associating it with the Curies , it seems that they approved the product. Neither Alfred Curie knew the scientists, nor had they ever washed their faces with any of the Thor-Radia products. There was a crossover of letters, but it is unknown if the thing reached greater. Thor-Radia ceased its activity in 1962.

They were not, however, the only ones to bathe in the fountain of eternal youth that the radium promised. The “Radio Hand Cleanser” hand cleansing cream claimed in 1915 to “remove everything except the skin”, which it would also remove, we added. There was a version for domestic cleaning. But it makes the hair stand on end even more the very extensive use of radium for therapeutic purposes, basically carried out by charlatans who could well have sold whiskey as a hair grower in the Wild West. The “Radium Radia” solution, for example, was sold in 1906 to alleviate the symptoms of “rheumatism, sciatica, lumbago, sprains, bruises and neuralgia”; It was withdrawn from the market the same year it was released because it did not contain any amount of radium, fortunately. Likewise, "Klein's Radium Salve" cream was sold as a remedy for hemorrhoids, although radium barely had the name.

The users of Radithor had less luck, which from the hand of its creator, William J.A. Bailey, promised to be the philosopher's stone of medicine. The Radithor, of which it was advised to take a bottle a day, was essentially radium dissolved in distilled water. It was sold freely until an American magnate, Eben M. Byers, died in 1932 from poisoning, after consuming 1,400 bottles of the invention. The same fake Dr. Bailey put up for sale a supposed aphrodisiac called Arium, which claimed to "renew youthful happiness and excitement in the lives of married people whose mutual attraction has weakened." Needless to say, Bailey struck gold.

Radiathor, a small bottle of radioactive water, was freely sold until the death in 1932 of a tycoon from poisoning; he had consumed 1,400 bottles

Over the course of several decades, quackery spread to all kinds of products: Bailey himself sold everything from paperweights to radioactive buckles. He was not the only one to become rich: in 1912 R.W. Thomas patented the “Revigator”, the name of which says it all. The artifact in question consisted of a ceramic vessel bathed in radioactive materials that had to be filled with water at night, so that in the morning it would be impregnated with radium. Analyzed its remains, it was discovered that it did not emit radioactivity in dangerous quantities, but it did provide a "source" of arsenic, lead and uranium, which is not bad.

Others, like the Radithor or the bones of the unfortunate celebrity who experienced its properties but not in the expected way, still emit radioactivity. Radioactivity so dangerous that several of the workers in a workshop who painted the hours on clocks by hand, the so-called Radium Girls, began to become ill from radiation. The case reached the courts and contributed to the gradual cessation of the use of radio, accentuated after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs in World War II. Radium stopped being seen even as a toy (meters were sold for children) or as a showy, showy and brilliant "eternal sun", as defined by William J.A. Bailey.

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