I’m too old and take too many pills to dream about normal things. I dream about the periodic table of elements, the only classification system in science that works. It was not devised by the dominant German, Swedish, English or French scientists in the 18th and 19th centuries who regarded themselves as intellectually superior to American and Russian scientists. The French happily disposed of their most famous chemist with the guillotine and, in the 19th century, Russian organic chemistry was so boring that chemistry professor Alexander Borodin took to writing music. Borodin was no slouch and actually has a chemical reaction named after him. Another Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, born a year after Borodin, was not interested in the structure of music, counterpoint, transcription of folk dance music and hauntingly eerie music describing the steppes. He was interested in the orderly classification of the chemical elements known at that time. Mendeleev’s classification was remarkable and he was able to predict the physical and properties of the many elements that had not yet been discovered.

Some of the data used by Mendeleev came from the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans who used all sorts of chemicals in high society. The upper classes used mascara (kohl) which was either the antimony sulphide stibnite or the lead sulphide galena. Kohl was painted on infants’ eyelids to stop the ‘evil eye’. Eye lashes and upper eyelids were painted black with kohl whereas the lower eyelids were painted green using the copper mineral malachite. Some green cosmetics also contained the green iron arsenate scorodite. Blue tints were from the copper mineral azurite. Stibnite and galena were roasted to give yellow, orange and brown oxides and, for those of pale complexion, the face was dusted with yellowish-brown antimony oxide or orange lead oxide whereas those with a somewhat darker complexion painted themselves with lead carbonate (cerussite) which gave a glowing lustrous complexion. The earthy reds in lipsticks and rouge derived from the iron oxide haematite but upper-class ladies used the far more lustrous pigment cinnabar, mercury sulphide. The foundation for powder was the inert clay mineral kaolinite. Up until 50 years ago, many talcum powders contained a small amount of chrysotile asbestos, a mineral commonly associated with talc and historically mined in parts of the old world.

I know many of you have tortured yourselves about why pharaohs and Greek and Roman emperors had a succession of wives who died young and had concluded that it was from misogynistic male behaviour. No. It was probably from females using fashionable heavy metal-based cosmetics. They slowly poisoned themselves with cumulative heavy metals partially soluble in water, gave themselves brain and central nervous system damage and shortened their lives.

Egyptian princesses glowed rather than perspired or sweated in the Nile heat, and their saline perspiration dissolved very small amounts of the gold from jewellery. As a cumulative poison, large doses of gold attack internal organs. The wearing of silver or copper jewellery resulted in metal oxidation from perspiration producing partially soluble metal compounds on the skin which are strong anti-bacterial agents.

One of the theories for Napoleon’s death was that he was exposed to and poisoned by arsenic. Neutron activation analyses of a bit of one of Napoleon’s hairs show it had a very high arsenic content suggesting he had died from internal organ failure from long-term arsenic poisoning. A nuclear reactor is required for high precision analysis on such a small sample. It was suggested that the arsenic derived from wallpaper. At that time, green lustrous insect-resistant wallpaper was stained with Scheele’s green, a copper arsenite. However, the French have the paranoidal view that Napoleon was deliberated despatched by the English administering arsenic poisons. But they are French! Today, a highly poisonous green chrome copper arsenate is used to treat timber to prevent rot and insect damage. Unless you want a good dose of heavy metals, don’t burn treated timbers or use them around your veggie garden.

Here is something confidential just for you. Sotto voce. Many Speccie readers probably have very good reasons to be poisoned by their spouse. If you suspect you’ll be poisoned, take a bit of commonly available arsenic-based rat poison each day and slowly increase the dose. When your spouse comes in for the kill with that high dose of arsenic, you’ll not die from the sudden overdose. You may die far later from long term cumulative arsenic poisoning but your spouse will not have the satisfaction of their dastardly deed.

I have my truths, and you are quite free to have your own truths. Both are unrelated to evidence. My first truth is that in my lifetime, we have changed from a diet with meat protein from free-range lamb (but mainly mutton) in the 1940s, 50s and 60s to one that, from the 1970s onwards, had oestrogen-fed caged chicken as a common source of meat protein. Could it be that this has slightly changed the hormones of young men, many of whom now appear more effeminate? If we can have an evidence-free anthropomorphic climate change theory that has swept the Western world despite no one showing that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive climate change, then I can have my chicken hormone theory. Try espousing my chicken hormone theory to an alphabet soup LBGTQ+ person and experience the peaceful world that many of them seek.

My second truth is about the appearance of those lefties who behave as if they are totally mentally unbalanced. In fact, they may be nursing damaged brains. You know the type, blue hair, tattoos and studs in visible and in unthinkable invisible places. I have often wondered about the effects of long-term exposure to traces of heavy metals and brain-altering complex organic molecule dye toxins. Tattoo dyes also contain traces of lead, cadmium, mercury or arsenic oxides; contain azo inks, which give vibrant colours, and are very complicated large organic molecules; contain polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon compounds; and contain hydrocarbons, glycerol, alcohols and resins. Blue hair dyes are a cocktail of anthraquinones and all sorts of other complex large-molecule organic chemicals. Studs are normally a nickel-chromium alloy, others have inert titanium and niobium. The oxidised forms of both nickel and chromium are highly toxic and affect the brain.

We know that heavy metals and many organic compounds have an effect on the brain yet we know very little about the exposure to traces of these chemicals over a lifetime because the high-precision analytical techniques did not exist 50 years ago to give a baseline. The accumulation over time of slight traces of heavy metals and complex organic compounds may contribute to the modern leftie lunacy. That’s my truth which, for reasons of emotion and not evidence, I stick to. If the Egyptians can poison themselves, so can the loopy lefties.