If you were a lady living in Victorian-era France, North America, or the U.K. and your favorite color was green, yep. For years, women flocked to a lovely emerald green hue used in fabrics and floral headdresses. Super flattering, right? Unfortunately for them (and the factory workers who made them and the fellow party guests the green-loving ladies interacted with), that brilliant hue was achieved by combining copper and arsenic. A group of society women found out about this somewhat inconvenient and dangerous fact and promptly blew the whistle, calling for a study and expose on the deadly duds. An expert concluded that a standard floral headdress contained enough arsenic to poison 20 people, while the green tarlatan used in ball gowns contained as much as half its weight in arsenic. What’s more, at least 60 grains would powder off during the course of an evening—with a lethal dose being just four or five grains for the average adult. Needless to say, this practice ended and we all went back to wearing clothing that wasn’t lethal. However, many fashion historians hypothesize that some of the older haute couture houses held on to a superstition against the bright, formerly dangerous hues, sticking with the more neutral blacks and whites that are still considered the height of chic today.
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