In 1775, Swedish and German pharmaceutical chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele created a new green pigment which he named Scheele’s Green. The brilliantly vivid green would soon be the allure of the Georgians and Victorians of the era.

The dazzling green would be the front of fashion, and come to decorate homes and bodies alike, but to the unexpected detriment of all whom it touched. This green was made with arsenic.

It’s amazing how in the 1800s Scheele’s Green would be on wallpapers and ballgowns, but by the 1930s it would be relegated as an insecticide.

Together with some other arsenic greens: Emerald Green, Scheele’s Green, Paris Green, a deadly shade of green would soon be found in nearly everyone’s homes, and touching everyone’s skin.

Dresses To Die For

This vibrant shade of green would be used as color for paper, wallpapers and paper hangings, in paints, wax candles, on children’s toys, on artificial flowers (worn by women), and as a dye for cotton and linen, which would then become clothing.

Because it dyed fabric bright green, arsenic also ended up in dresses, gloves, shoes, and artificial flower wreaths that women used to decorate their hair and clothes. At its height of popularity, seven tons of Scheele’s green was being shipped out of England in 1860.

These arsenic greens were also used a food dye for sweets such as green blancmange.

Bakers used arsenic green as food coloring, and some restaurants even added it to their drinks. In 1858, in the deadly Bradford sweets poisoning, twenty-one people perished from arsenic-laced hard candies sold by a local character known as Humbug Billy. 

The toxicity of dye made with emerald green was not initially recognized, until the recipe was published in 1822. But it did not make a huge difference. People were still willing to use these toxic dyes.

In 1861, 19-year-old Matilda Scheurer had worked in a factory where she dyed fake flowers green, but died from her exposure. She convulsed, vomited, and foamed at the mouth. Her bile was green, and so were her fingernails and the whites of her eye. An autopsy found arsenic in her stomach, liver, and lungs.

A decade prior, Britain first passed the 1851 Sale of Arsenic Act, which still didn’t keep it from being sold, but required records of who purchased it and for what purpose, so that if there was a poisoning, there would be a paper trail. 

Many people were using arsenic to poison and murder. Most notably, Mary Ann Cotton is considered to be Britain’s most prolific female serial killer. She allegedly poisoned up to 21 people before being executed in 1873, including most of her children (she ended up bearing 13 children between 3 husbands), all three of her husbands–all after she had taken out life insurance policies on them.

The first regulations on arsenic use in paper products would not be passed until 1904.

The first Pure Food and Drug Act in the US was passed in 1906, but consumer products containing poisonous chemicals like arsenic would still be marketed to the public for many more decades. 

Arsenic Complexion Wafers were marketed as a safe way for women to improve complexion, as late as the 1920s. The wafers made the skin fashionably pale by destroying red blood cells. 

Yet there was a price for this beauty treatment. Deaths also occurred, such as that of 18-year-old Hildegarde Walton of St Louis, who died in 1911 having taken several boxes of wafers in an attempt to clear up a skin complaint.

How Poisonous Is Arsenic?

The effects of arsenic exposure are horrific. In addition to being deadly, it produces ulcers all over the skin. Those who come in close contact with it might develop scabs and sores wherever it touched. It can also make your hair fall out, and can cause people to vomit blood before shutting down their livers and kidneys.

Arsenic is quickly absorbed into the bloodstream and then deposited throughout the body. The first effects of arsenic occur thirty to sixty minutes after swallowing it—a sharp, burning pain in the stomach and esophagus. That symptom is followed by nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.

Strange Arsenic Facts

Sally Fallon of Nourishing Traditions writes that Louis Pasteur developed the first anthrax vaccine back in the 1880s as a way to address “anthrax outbreaks” which had been killing sheep in the French countryside may have actually been the ‘sheep dip’ used to control insects on the sheep, which incidentally, was made with arsenic powder.

“The world’s first sheep dip was invented and produced by George Wilson of Coldstream, Scotland in 1830—it was based on arsenic powder. One of the most successful brands was Cooper’s Dip, developed in 1852 by the British veterinary surgeon and industrialist William Cooper. Cooper’s dip contained arsenic powder and sulfur. The powder had to be mixed with water, so naturally agricultural workers—let alone sheep dipped in the arsenic solution–sometimes became poisoned.”

According to Dr. Whorton, in England in the 1870s, there was an epidemic of talcum powder poisonings of babies in Essex County.

“Somehow arsenic got into talcum powder for babies. It’s very irritating to the skin, and ended up killing a number of babies because it was absorbed through the vagina and was inhaled. There was a national scandal over that in the 1870s, and it was a violation of the 1862 Food and Drug Act for medicinal agents.  The person who sold the powder was tried but acquitted because he claimed he got the ingredients from several suppliers that accidentally added arsenic, but he didn’t know about it, so it was beyond his control.  And they couldn’t prove that any suppliers knew about the arsenic.  The case didn’t provoke any new legislation.”

The chemist who discovered the arsenic green, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, had over his life cumulative exposure to arsenic, mercury, lead, their compounds and perhaps hydrofluoric acid which he had discovered, as well as other substances took their toll on Scheele, who died at the early age of 43, on 21 May 1786, at his home in Köping. Doctors said that he died of mercury poisoning.