Radium and You

November 21st, 2011, 09:19 pm

Radium and You

Radior wasn't the only company marketing trace amounts of dangerous radioactive substances:

Thoradia & others packaged radium (and thorium, hence the name) into some astonishing products.

Many of them were beauty aids, creams, lotions, soaps, etc. The most striking ad is this one:

And its many variants:

All pics enlarge!

But the best ones are the places you'd least expect radium. In chocolate, condoms, and knitting wool - seriously.

So we have

CHOCOLATE BARS

CONDOMS

WATER CONDITIONER

and WOOL. For knitting your baby a little radium jumper. D:

Of course, you could always make yourself some longjohns too, for skiing.

TOOTHPASTE

DOSE UP THE FARM ANIMALS TOO!

Heck, what can't SCIENCE! do for us? (Science is the one that looks A LOT like the wicked stepmother from Snow White)

See?

Tags: 1920s, 1930s, clothing, dessert, toiletries

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Nothing says loving like a glowing penis?

Well it's called Nutex so it must be fancy.

(no subject) - (Anonymous)

about the ladies who put the radium on the watch faces? if that's what you mean, it was a horrifyingly sad sad story indeed.

Errrmmmm....that last condom sample? All I can say is, "Buddy, you're not getting anywhere near me with that thing on your prick."

But damn, those fonts are great!!!

Radium chocolate! To transform you into a superhero!

the content is hilarious, but those layouts gave me a designgasm. <3

They're pretty amazing in every way, I agree. 1920s/30s poster design was at a high point.

"Look, Ma. No cavities or body tissue!"

Yay, I can make radium water in my own home!

_{And immediately get arrested by MI5. ;)}

Pity the poor man whose penis suddenly mutated...and not in a good way.

"look honey, i can give you the DP with only one man!"

sorry, mind did a gutter-dive.

again. ;)

(no subject) -

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fallconsmate Expand

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vp19 Expand

Talk about spooky in the first ad! Alfred Curie? Yikes!

Nice catch! I failed to notice that.

(no subject) -

mzmadmike Expand

Well, if you're going to let your body parts rot off from radiation poisoning, doing it surrounded by cool art deco packaging is the way to go!

I want to be the face of radium...

I can only hope that the advertisers were liars and the closest thing to radium in their soaps and clothes, etc. was rock quartz.

The grossest, saddest abuse of a model was a film about Lucky Strike cigarettes, where the model was dipping the wrappers into a vat of mercury to show how they're water tight.

They couldn't just use water?

They didn't fully understand the effects of mercury, or consider them worth worrying about.

Ask anyone over 40 if they ever played with mercury - they'll say yes. We knew not to eat it, but we had a lot of fun in science class rolling a ball of liquid metal around in our palms. We also used to play with Wood's metal, a lead alloy that melts in hot water. Ah, our toxic childhood. :D

ETA, no lying (although I'm sure SOME manufacturers lied). There WAS radium, in very very small amounts. In fact, even a famous line of dishware, "Fiestaware" used to have one color, a vibrant orange, made with uranium. All the dishes are still "hot" to this day; hubby has a collection and we pointed a Geiger counter at it once. TICTICTICTICTICTICTIC!

Edited at 2011-11-23 04:45 pm (UTC)

But it's 100% natural! Natural is good for you!

I point out these ads whenever someone blindly endorses "natural" or "ecologically sound."

Phosphorus is natural, too, but your bones won't like you if you ingest a lot of it.

well there's a difference between "natural" and "should be in your body". Monsanto makes all sorts of things that shouldn't be in our bodies, but they managed to make an orange seem evil and simultaneously make chemicals seem just fine: