4 Bizarre Renaissance Practices

People in the Renaissance didn’t just float around in fancy dresses, dance in masques and eat peacocks with their feathers stuck back on after roasting. Here are some outlandish things they really did do.

Ladies sunned their hair.

Sun on your skin was not attractive during the Renaissance... a lady should have perfectly pale skin with rosy cheeks, and only a peasant had skin tanned by the sun. However, blonde or light brown hair was considered the quintessence of beauty, so if you weren’t lucky enough to be born with it, you put on a wide-brimmed sort of headband that shaded your face and neck and exposed your hair  to the sun for its bleaching effect.

Ladies put ceruse on their faces.

 “Ceruse” might sound glamorous but it was actually white carbonate of lead ground to a powder and made into a paste with vinegar. Over that highly poisonous and smelly base, you painted raw egg white to give your whitened complexion that youthful sheen. Yuck! On the other hand, you have to wonder what people five hundred years from now will be saying about our cosmetics.

Men got nose jobs after losing their noses to war or duels.

No, really. There were two main variations. One was the “Indian” style, in which a flap of skin was partially cut from the forehead (it needed to remain attached to preserve blood flow), pulled down, twisted and sewn into place in a kind of nose-shaped fashion. The other was developed by a fellow named Gaspare Tagliacozzi, who would cut a flap of skin from the upper arm, shape it into a nose, and then graft it to the patient’s face. Since the new “nose” was still attached to the patient’s arm, a complicated arrangement of bandages was used to immobilize the arm and hold the new “nose” in place until it healed and could be cut free.

Sick people cured themselves of the plague with chickens and their own urine.

 Black Death came and went throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. No one really understood what caused it (those pesky fleas) and so, of course, many claimed to know different “cures”. One recipe was to snuggle up to a live hen, which would draw the pestilence out of your body, and at the same time drink a glass of your own urine twice a day to speed up your recovery.