Sick of watching people fluff their hair and make duck face to their phones? Let us take you away to another time that makes our modern silliness blush with "eh, it's not so bad".
1. 🧠 Trepanation: Drill a Hole in Your Head, Feel Better? (Ancient to Renaissance Europe)
People believed that drilling a hole in their skull would release evil spirits, cure migraines, or enhance consciousness. It was practiced all over the world, from Neolithic times to 17th-century Europe.
Spoiler: it mostly released blood and confusion, not demons.
2. 👘 Foot Binding in China (10th–20th century)
This trend lasted for nearly a thousand years and involved breaking and tightly binding young girls’ feet to keep them small and "lotus-like."
Why? Because tiny feet were seen as hot.
Result? Generations of women with lifelong disabilities... for fashion. ✨
3. 💇♂️ Victorian Hair Jewelry (1800s Britain)
People made bracelets, brooches, and even entire wreaths out of dead relatives' hair.
Not as a creepy ritual—just normal mourning chic. Imagine wearing grandma’s curls as a choker to a ball.
4. 🐦 The Great Emu War Fashion Trend (Australia, 1932)
Okay, not fashion—but people genuinely believed wearing emu feathers would bring prestige. So when the emus started overrunning farmland, the government declared war on the birds.
The emus won.
Humans: 0, Giant Flightless Birds: 1.
5. 🔥 The Hoop Skirt Arms Race (18th–19th century Europe)
Women’s skirts got so wide with whale-bone crinolines and panniers that they couldn’t fit through doors. At one point, skirts were literally six feet wide—fashionable ladies had to turn sideways to enter a room and could knock over candles and entire dinner tables just by walking.
