Kim Kardashian gets vampire facelifts. Demi Moore uses leeches to detox her body. Bull semen is harvested for hair masks. What’s next — snail slime facials? Already happening. Pig placenta face cream? Oh, you betcha.
Since time immemorial, people have been obsessing over appearance-enhancing treatments. And some beauty tricks leaned towards the gory side — in Victorian England, upper-class fashionistas ingested tapeworm eggs to lose weight, practiced bloodletting and applied radioactive radium masks to achieve that come-hither, deathly palid look they found so fetching.
Luckily for us, cultural developments and advances in science (and common sense) have since collaborated to make these ‘therapies’ go out of style. But we are a vain species — old freakish rituals have been replaced with new ones that also bear the promise of eternal youth and beauty.