According to Smithsonian, this dates at least as far back as Roman times, when people would wash their clothes in pee. So good news, if your cat pees in your clean laundry that makes it cleaner! No really, pee was considered so vital to the proper care of clothing that cities would set up barrels on the street for people to pee into, and then they would collect the pee and take it to the public laundry to be put to good use.
.jpg)
This is obviously disgusting but not as crazy as you might think — urine contains ammonia, and ammonia is still commonly used as a cleansing agent. In fact, even after people invented soap, they still to use pee for the laundry because the ammonia was better at loosening up tough stains. It was also great at helping dye stick to cloth, so it became indispensable to the textile industry. As late as the 16th century, people were still collecting pee specifically as a "mordant," or a treatment that cloth makers could apply to fabric to ensure bright, long-lasting color. Sadly, Smithsonian fails to note how they eventually got the smell out. Because cat pee is forever.
Queen Elizabeth I sort of popularized the close-to-death look, but she didn't invent it. Lead-based makeup was a thing from ancient Egypt all the way through the 18th century, until people finally figured out that the reason they looked so crappy in old age was because their makeup made their skin a permanently bizarre color and was probably also responsible for their hair and teeth falling out.
According to National Geographic, lead makeup was popular with wealthy women because they believed pasty-white was a youthful look. Because come on, who doesn't want to look like a sickly child who was raised in a basement? Anyway, the lead-based makeup Elizabeth used was basically the same as Roman women used. Before that, the Egyptians used lead-based powders as eyeliner, which is what you see when you look at ancient portraits of pharaohs and other important people. Weirdly, Egyptian eye makeup did work to prevent eye infections, which was cool because most Egyptians didn't live past their 30s anyway so they didn't have time to develop eye cancer or whatever other horrible diseases may have followed a lifetime of getting lead in your eyes.