Radium marie curie6/13/2023 Although a real person and a medical doctor, Alfred Curie has not been identified as having any research interest in radiation or a background in chemistry. Tho-Radia also claimed that their products were made to the ‘Formule du Docteur Alfred Curie.’ While historians originally thought that Dr Curie was a fictional marketing device, his existence has subsequently been established. Radium as a form of ‘liquid sunshine’ had been a popular analogy from its discovery. Heliotherapy and consumer devices designed to simulate or capture the health-giving benefits of sunshine became popular. Many scientists feared that people, increasingly living and working in urban environments, were not getting enough sunshine. The ‘healthy glow’ shown on Tho-Radia Girl’s irradiated face had become an important component of idealised beauty in the late 19th century, but it was even more so in the 1920s and 1930s, as deliberate tanning and the benefits of sunshine were outlined in the press and medical journals. This reference can be seen most strikingly in an advertising poster for the product’s launch, attributed to the designer Tony Burnand, which shows a young blonde white woman (known as the Tho-Radia girl) illuminated by a light coming from branded Tho-Radia products. The Curies had shown that, while radium looks like common salt in the daytime, it glows at night because radiation agitates the nitrogen that is naturally present in the air, creating a buzz of energy perceptible as a shimmer of light. Tho-Radia’s advertising material visually referenced the naturally luminous properties of radium. For Tho-Radia this meant a small amount of radium bromide added to their extensive range of products which included soap, toothpaste, day- and night creams, rouge à lèvres in 12 colours and other cosmetics, skin tonics and beauty milks. This had its roots in hormesis, practitioners of which maintained that small doses of any noxious agent could exert a beneficial action. While these products were presented for a variety of ailments, diseases and inconveniences, they had in common the treatment philosophy of mild radium therapy. At Boots the Chemists, you could acquire Sparklet’s ‘Spa-Radium Bulbs’, which turned tap water into carbonated radioactive water, a Nu Ray Radium Lamp (a combination of radioactive materials and a household electric lamp) or some Radior radium toiletries (‘guaranteed to contain actual radium and remain radio-active for 20 years’). There had been health products such as the O-Radium Hat Pad (‘whenever you are wearing your hat, you are subjecting your hair to beneficent rays’) and the spa towns of Bath and Buxton offered glasses of radium water in their pump rooms. Radium, which was discovered by Marie Skłodowska Curie in 1898, had already been the subject of scientific, medical, entrepreneurial and public fascination for several decades by the time Tho-Radia hit the shelves. It was, the editorial noted, ‘a perfect scientific method of keeping the skin of the face and neck in order’ thanks to the principal ingredient: radium bromide, a known radioactive component. The Paris-based beauty range Tho-Radia could be used for ‘toning up and strengthening of the tissues of the skin, the elimination of fat, and the removal of wrinkles’. In 1933, The Hairdresser and Beauty Trade magazine announced the launch of a new product to its British audience.
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