Tho-Radia Radioactive Radium Makeup Cosmetics Ad
by Tina Lavoie
Title
Tho-Radia Radioactive Radium Makeup Cosmetics Ad
Artist
Tina Lavoie
Medium
Photograph - Paint
Description
I want to share this fascinating vintage cosmetics poster with you. It's for a product called Tho-Radia and it was marketed in the 1930s. The image for it is stunning and kinda creepy. Tho-Radia came in cream and powder for and it was made with Radium and Thorium. Radium is quite radioactive. Radium's most stable isotope, radium-226, has a half-life of about 1600 years.Thorium is a weakly radioactive metallic chemical element. They mixed it together for makeup because it kind of glows. In the olden days, they painted clock faces with it so they would glow in the dark, but that's a whole other horror story for another time. Tho-Radia was advertised as being a scientific method of beauty (Méthod Scientific de Beauté). The medical ‘benefits’ of radium had been highly publicised in the French press and were well known by the French populace in the 1930s but they had no idea how dangerous radioactivity was. This advertising poster shows a face lit from below which makes it look like it is ‘glowing’. These cosmetics were invented in part by Dr. Alfred Curie, who was no relation to inventors Andre and Marie Curie. Of course, this brings up the issue of dangerous cosmetics through the ages, and that are still an issue today. Not Radium and Thorium, though!
Uploaded
August 9th, 2019
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