We Need to Talk About Leather Gloves
Classic, versatile, and potentially poisonous?
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It would be hard to find a person who doesn’t have leather gloves. Whether you’ve got ‘em for working in the garden and chopping wood, you’re a sexy vixen wearing them for the lewk, or you’re simply want something warm to wear in the winter, they’re versatile and classic.
But leather gloves also have a long, notorious history of being poisonous.
It starts in 1572, when Catherine de’ Medici, queen mother of France, went shopping with Jeanne d’Albret, ruler of Navarre, a tiny kingdom sandwiched in between France and Spain. They were prepping for the royal marriage of their teenage children, and as part of the grand shopping trip, Catherine brought Jeanne to her favorite Italian perfumer, where Jeanne bought perfumed gloves.
Popularized by Catherine herself, perfumed gloves had become somewhat a necessary indulgence for those with means in this late Renaissance period. The streets of Paris and even the inner courtyards of the palace were redolent with the smell of unwashed bodies and animal manure, and these gloves were a luxury to help protect the nobles’ noses against the ever-present stench, plus mask the stench of the leather gloves themselves.
As I write in my book To Dye For, for hundreds of years, tanneries reeked not only of rotten flesh but also excrement. Many tanneries in Europe used dog, chicken, or pigeon manure to preserve the hides and make them soft and pliable. So the perfumed gloves were dipped in boiled animal fat infused with jasmine, orange blossom, violets, musk, ambergris, and other herbs to make them more pleasant.
Jeanne died a few days after the shopping trip, and the rumor among the aristocracy was that it was the gloves that did her in. After all, Italians had a reputation for profligately poisoning their enemies and rivals. Catherine was originally from Italy, and she did not get along with Jeanne.
Jeanne likely died from a final bout of recurring tuberculosis, not from poisoned gloves. But fast-forward a couple hundred years, and there’s at least one recorded instance of very poisonous gloves.
In 1871, Medical Press and Circular reported on a British lady who suffered skin ulcerations around her fingernails. The culprit was her new green gloves. At the time, green dye was made using arsenic. So, the gloves weren’t deadly, at least not right away. But they were definitely toxic!
Today, when it comes to leather, there’s another chemical that is way more concerning.