t may seem foolish now, even downright grotesque, but we have a long history of going to deadly lengths for beauty. In Elizabethan times, the upper class risked renal failure under heavy layers of white lead and borax powder to achieve the much-desired ghostly pallor of the time. In the 1920s, we suddenly tossed our centuries-long skin-whitening ways out the window and embraced the equally injurious UV rays in a bid to emulate Coco Chanel – her accidental faux glow during a summer sojourn in the French Riviera is credited for our obsession with suntanned limbs to this day.
