“Ladies, you can be beautiful,” read a listing in a 1902 Sears Roebuck & Co. catalog. “No matter who you are, what your disfigurements may be, you can make yourself as handsome as any lady in the land by the use of our French Arsenic Wafers.”
With just a few nibbles, these wafers were a guaranteed sure cure for freckles, blackheads, pimples, redness, and rough, yellow, or muddy skin, and they were said to permanently remove any facial impurities, leaving only a “deliciously clear complexion” in their place. For decades, women flocked to their nearest drugstores and ordered tins of the wafers in masses, swallowing their false promises of beauty right alongside the poisonous metalloid.
