Why go to Vegas when you can visit the British Museum?

Someone once told me that you could see the world by going to Vegas. There's an Eiffel Tower, Venetian Gondolas and more buffets than a person could ever eat through. But I can suggest one better - the British Museum in London. If you really want to see the world from the beginning of time, here is the place to do it. Disco, Ben's brother in law suggested it saying it was a massive display of "all the stuff we nicked while building the British Empire". And when he mentioned it was free - I thought, hey, I can get in some culture without further spending my RRSPs in this un-Godly expensive place.

And, like most things I experience, I quickly found that looking through history can relate to beauty and wellness. I know, I usually like to write postings about pampering treatments and new gadgets (I bought two face massagers in the UK!) - but I thought a bit of history would be fun - as well as looking back really started to tell me about us today and how we treat ourselves.

The first thing I noticed was that human beings are completely impractical when it comes to beauty. Get a load of these finger nail covers from China!

I wondered if they would display our ridiculous vanity and have exhibits with spray tan shower stalls in the future.

But moreover than impractical, I began to see how uncomfortable women through the ages have made themselves. Heavy gold anklets which made me wonder if women in the past had better muscle tone than we do today. This question continued to go unanswered while in the jade exhibit where I discovered Jade hair covers (you would cover your hair bun with a dome of jade and stick a jade needle through it to stay in place. And somehow still hold your head up..?).

But this sort of rigorous beauty exercise still goes on today as woman traipse around in five inch heels and maintain a hip-hugging wardrobe in sub-zero temperatures.

Yes, beauty has been prized since the beginning of time - with luxuriousness like hand carved make-up bowls from Egypt. They were used to put eyeshadow in (Kohl). But before we scoff at this remember, we come from a culture of caviar creams and moisturizers containing real gold flakes.

But the most interesting was a contemporary display called "Cradle to Grave" in the Living and Death exhibition room. Here, the installation displayed a mesh blanket stuffed with the prescription pills prescribed to one elderly couple over their entire lifetime. This amounted to over 14,000 different medicines, 40,000 individual pills, and the cloth piece must have been about 60 metres long as it was doubled up. It was a comment on how we solve our health problems and the public health system today. And despite how funny and uncomfortable I may think adornment and beauty were in the past, today we take much more abusive measures to treat our bodies.