In this next instalment of ‘Trends from the WAY past’, I will be talking about the Radium trend in the early 20th Century and Radioactive Makeup. The part of the video that discusses this is from 5:58 to 7:07. Once again, you don’t have to watch the video to read this post!
In the case of the radium trend, the influencer involved is arguably none other than Marie and Pierre Curie. In 1898, they had famously discovered radium. By 1910, they had successfully extracted radium as a pure metal. This groundbreaking discovery did not only enamour America, along with the rest of the world, but radium was hailed as a panacea for everything from blindness to hysteria (Orci, 2013). This lead to a wave of “science-based” consumer goods to sweep the world. Specifically, cosmetic products started incorporating radium in face creams, soaps and powders amongst other products. The appeal of these products was that any product that contained radium, was just somehow… better…?
“Radium” had become synonymous with “revolutionary” (Eriksson and O’Hagan, 2021) and products that did not even contain the element started marketing their products with the word “radium” (Orci, 2013). This was especially attractive to the emergent middle class who wanted to keep up with scientific advances and were attracted to fashionable, rather than necessary, goods to improve their well-being (Eriksson and O’Hagan, 2021). The discovery of radium preceded an understanding of the health hazards that it posed. Hence, for many years, radium was used in a way that exposed many people to large amounts of the element (Brugge and Buchner, 2012).
Fortunately, the use of radium in cosmetics was limited to small quantities that did not necessarily leave consumers in vulnerable positions. However, not everyone had the same fate. One of the case studies that highlighted the negative impacts of radium exposure to human health was the case of the Radium Girls. The Radium Girls were young women who worked as watch dial painters in the early 20th century. This took place in New Jersey, USA and affected young women and girls as young as 12 years old. Radium was used to create glow-in-the-dark watch faces. To create fine paint brush tips, they would clean the brushes between their lips, causing them to ingest relatively large amounts of radium (Brugge and Buchner, 2012). Furthermore, the radium contaminated the air in the factories, causing the women’s clothes, skin and hair to be covered in the element. As a result, about ten years later, these Radium Girls would start to die and suffered many health implications (Orci, 2013).
Today, radium is no longer used in medical or consumer products. But does this mean that there is no longer any risk of radium poisoning? Well…. no. Naturally, radium is found in soil, water, plants, and food at low concentrations (Brugge and Buchner, 2012).The greatest potential for human exposure to radium today is through drinking water, where levels are usually < 37 mBq/L, but higher levels ( > 185 mBq/L) have been detected. This exposure occurs through leaching, that is, the process of water moving contaminants through soil of radium from uranium mine and mill tailings as the most significant source of radium releases into water (Brugge and Buchner, 2012). Furthermore, the burning of fossil fuels releases radium and other naturally occurring radionuclides into the air. Radium can also be taken up by plants growing in contaminated soil and may also deposit on plant surfaces (Brugge and Buchner, 2012).
Brugge, D. & Buchner, V. (2012). Radium in the environment: exposure pathways and health effects. Reviews on Environmental Health, 27(1), 1-17. https://doi-org.libproxy1.nus.edu.sg/10.1515/reveh-2012-0001.
Eriksson, G. & O’Hagan, L. A. (2021). Selling “Healthy” Radium Products With Science: A Multimodal Analysis of Marketing in Sweden, 1910–1940. Science Communication, 46(6), 740-767, DOI: 10.1177/10755470211044111.
Orci, T. (2013). How We Realized Putting Radium in Everything Was Not the Answer. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/03/how-we-realized-putting-radium-in-everything-was-not-the-answer/273780/.