What May Have Caused the Death of Elizabeth

Once upon a time, snow-white skin was considered the chic, sexy look of the Elizabethan English elite. Queen Elizabeth I's signature ghostly makeup typified the 16th-century ideal for women, her porcelain skin representing nobility and earthly perfection. But to achieve that perfection, Elizabeth covered her face with makeup composed largely of lead. She also rubbed mercury on her lips and probably used a mercury-based makeup remover that ate away at her flesh. Today, we're talking about Elizabeth I, the makeup that may have led to her death. During the Virgin Queen's era, the highest standard for female beauty was smooth, blindingly white skin. To achieve this look, Elizabeth wore Venetian ceruse, a cosmetic made from white lead and vinegar. She powdered her face and neck with the substance, transforming her pocky skin — more on that later — into an eerie porcelain canvas that probably smelled like sour wine. That's certainly one way to maintain your virginity. Thanks to 400 years of science, we now know that applying lead to the face on a daily basis causes very serious and often irreversible problems like hair loss and skin deterioration. And death by lead poisoning, which, in the 16th century, was pretty damn final. It may well have been for Queen Elizabeth, but lead wasn't the only poison in her pigments. Let's look at the other suspect. Snow White's mom wished for more than a tiny ghost baby. She also wanted her to have lips as red as blood on winter roses. Made from cinnabar, a toxic mineral containing mercury, the RL Queen's lip stain gave her the signature red mouth that leaps out at you in all those creepy paintings. So, we have two horrific poisons working in tandem through skin absorption over long periods of time. On the surface, the lead face slowly corroded the Queen's skin. In response, Elizabeth wore thicker and thicker layers of makeup, reportedly layering makeup an inch thick toward the end of her life. Symptoms of mercury poisoning include memory loss, irritability, and depression — conditions Elizabeth reportedly experienced toward the end of her life. Now we're getting warmer. In the Elizabethan era, nobles didn't clean off their makeup nightly. Heck, most modern women have been guilty of that at least a couple times. After her maids carefully applied lead and mercury makeup to the royal face, Elizabeth herself wore it for at least a week. Forget about pore blockage. The lead soaked into her skin, causing it to turn gray and wrinkled. When Elizabeth finally had her makeup removed, historians suggest she might have used a gross concoction containing eggshells, alum, and — you guessed it — more mercury. Some claimed the mercury makeup remover left their skin soft, but that was only because it was literally skinning them alive, one layer at a time. As a teen, Queen Elizabeth didn't wear quite so much lead face, not simply because she was a child, but because she hadn't caught smallpox yet. On October 10, 1562, she was struck with a high fever and displayed all the hallmarks of the pox. Courtiers worried and worried that Elizabeth would die within the week, but the young royal survived. Unfortunately, the disease left her with permanent scars in her terrible twenties, when life is either a bed of roses or a garbage fire, and scars don't stack the odds against the latter. Smallpox scars were a common problem at the time, hence the willingness of women to wear vinegary lead face. Elizabeth's close friend Mary Sidney got stuck with them, too. As Henry Sidney, Mary's husband, wrote, "...the scars, to a resolute discomfort, ever since have done and do remain on her face." Trying to survive in an atmosphere of constant bitchiness, Elizabeth did everything possible to cover up such blemishes and keep that virginity on lockdown. Anything to avoid a husband who updates people on his wife's pockmarks. There haven't been many female rulers in English history. Let's face it, in any history, a fact with which Elizabeth was all too familiar. She knew all eyes were on her, and that any scarring on her face would mark her not as a survivor, but a pariah in those eyes. In 1586, a fifties-ish Elizabeth commented on the weight of these expectations while addressing Parliament. "'We princes, I tell you, are set on stages in the sight and view of all the world duly observed. The eyes of many behold our actions. A spot is soon spied in our garments. a blemish noted quickly in our doings." In a ballsy act of pre-Instagram filtering, Elizabeth flat-out forbade unflattering portraits of herself. Painters were given an opportunity to get really, really creative. They had to make her look young and supple and white, even as she entered her autumn years, which, in this case, is a little too good at describing what happens to human skin after decades of lead makeup. Here's the trick. The artist had to make the portrait recognizable as Queen Elizabeth without showing any of the scarred, sagging, and perhaps even molting skin beneath that inch-thick mask of white. Enter the famous Darnley portrait, painted in 1575. It became a godsend of a model for later portrayals, as grateful artists reused its depiction of Elizabeth's face in paintings for decades. Elizabeth's battle against the ravages of time was fierce and lasted literally all her life. One of her wiser tricks was to wear a wig — Lord knows what lunacy would have been used to dye grays away back then. For a long time, it was basically like Shatner's toupee — it existed, but was never officially confirmed. Until 1599, when the Earl of Essex blew that secret out of the water and immortalized it expressing his shock upon beholding his elderly queen's mostly bald pate, with only a thin ring of hair hanging about the ears. We can't unsee that now. Thanks, Earl. In the last months of her life, Elizabeth refused to let doctors examine her. The queen had fallen into a deep melancholy, according to a member of her court. Elizabeth refused to rest. She believed that if she lay down she would never get up, so Elizabeth stood for 15 hours straight, with her ladies spreading pillows around the queen for when she inevitably collapsed. On March 24, 1603, Elizabeth passed away. Possible causes of death include cancer or pneumonia, but Elizabeth's use of lead and mercury-based makeup for decades in increasingly liberal doses certainly at least contributed to her declining health. After a lifetime of lead and mercury poisoning, Elizabeth's body was toxic. Elizabeth Southwell, one of the queen's ladies-in-waiting, claimed that Elizabeth's body burst in her coffin at her wake due to the abundance of noxious vapors. Although Southwell's account has often been dismissed as Jesuit propaganda of all things, exploding coffins aren't unheard of, even today. The phenomenon is called exploding casket syndrome, and it's what happens when a corpse is sealed a bit too well. The coffin acts as a pressure cooker for all the gases and fluids produced by a decomposing body until, well, there's a reason this got chalked up to bad religion. Here's another horrible thing. While Elizabeth certainly suffered the effects of lead and mercury poisoning, she may have actually died from blood poisoning. Just a week before she passed in 1603, Elizabeth's doctors recommended a risky procedure. For 45 years since the day she was crowned, Elizabeth wore a coronation ring. The ring began cutting into Elizabeth's well-poisoned skin and presumably kept on cutting. Doctors warned her that the ring had to be surgically removed, and a week later, she died. And then exploded, depending on who you ask. Evidence of people using lead for makeup dates back to at least the 5th century BCE. During the time of the Roman Empire, women powdered their faces with lead. By the 16th century, the concoction was known as Venetian ceruse, or the spirits of Saturn, Queen Elizabeth's favorite cosmetic. I personally prefer Mac." Unfortunately for her and every other Cyrus fan in history, it wasn't classified as a poison until 1634, less than 40 years after her death, which it had at least one hand in, if not both. People knew it caused hair loss and skin damage, but it took a long time for us to figure out that we were literally killing ourselves in the name of beauty. In many ways, we still are. Like it or not, pain and death for beauty is a very old and well-entrenched tradition, And it's not done with us.