Vintage and Retro Ads, Promos, Fliers, Etc. Lead paint creates serious health risks, but this ad is from 1939, when lead in paint was normal. Many countries phased in bans starting in the 1970s or 80s, mandating lower and lower concentrations over time, or restricting permissible uses, or both. Some countries still allow unrestricted use of lead paint in 2026.
Lead exposure is very bad for anyone, especially children. Unlike certain other toxins, there's no known safe level of exposure, and it bioaccumulates. There are many other routes into the body besides paint, and some are associated with increased crime rates and intellectual deficits in children.
Apparently, lead in paint made it taste sweet, which is where all the allusions to kids eating paint chips, or "wall candy" may have come from.
Yep, and on top of that, after enough time it could break down into fine dust, leading to inhalation, even if a child never directly chewed on a window sill.
Nasty, in residential applications. I feel like it has some common ground with hookworm, having degrading social effects, and imposing its problems over time.
The antiquated adspeak wording here is really strange to me
It isn't the metal of course. But white lead is made straight from the pure metal, lead
It's gospel truth that you're money ahead when you paint with white lead.
The antiquated adspeak wording here is really strange to me
You're just money behind.
That's a weirdly threatening statement, I love it as a chat response
It occupies a much needed middle ground between "I hope you get an unsatisfiable itch between your big toe the next one", on one end, and outright threats of immediate physical violence on the other.
For too long has the mid-tier threat regime been under-served.
To me it sounds along the same lines of the curse "may you live in interesting times" or the more mundane "I hope you step on a lego"
Tho yours reminds me of the (I think) Yiddish curse "may all your teeth fall out except one, so you can have a toothache"
Imagine if advertising was still like this, but on the Internet. Giant ads full of paragraph after paragraph begging for your purchase.
What I find to be interesting is the ad was 100% correct. Lead paint was much more durable than other forms of paint at the time, and it still outperforms many modern paints. It's still used industrially in some countries with lead paint bans, typically for large, outdoor, metal structures like bridges, holding tanks, pipelines, etc.
We have a ranch house out in the desert that was built in the late 1940s. Some parts of it still have the original coat of lead paint. Even if you wanted it to be pristine, that paint was a "reapply once per generation" thing.
Shame about the heavy metal poisoning, because the stuff's fantastic otherwise.
This is horrific. I wonder what things we are doing to ourselves today in a similar fashion.
I’d be shocked if microplastics and ‘forever chemicals’ like PFAS aren’t viewed like this in the future. Did you know they used to put microplastics in fucking toothpaste?? They called it ‘microbeads’.
Oh, fuck, I remember those. I didn't realize those were plastic.
I work in water. I've heard a lot of water departments say that recently. As far as I'm aware nothing is changing yet, they just assume it will.
We still allow lead in small airplane fuel. Just blow it all into the air.
Look into factory farming.
Nanoplastics in particular can wind up in the bloodstream and throughout the body. At the nanoscale, the immune system will recognize plastic particles as pathogens and then macrophages will envelop and attempt to digest them. That causes all sorts of inflammatory signals to be put out. That then accelerates inflammaging and all of the associated diseases and conditions. There's clear evidence for every step of this, the remaining hurdle is quantifying just how much damage it's doing.
inflammaging
I think the word you're looking for is "inflammation".
Ageing and age-related diseases share some basic mechanistic pillars that largely converge on inflammation. During ageing, chronic, sterile, low-grade inflammation — called inflammaging — develops, which contributes to the pathogenesis of age-related diseases. From an evolutionary perspective, a variety of stimuli sustain inflammaging, including pathogens (non-self), endogenous cell debris and misplaced molecules (self) and nutrients and gut microbiota (quasi-self).
AI
Plastic.
