I was scouring the net for purple stories when I came across a headline that piqued my purple curiosity. It read, “Purple is Fading from Woman’s Skin.” Fearing it was some sort of trend away from purple makeup, I clicked on it and found a scanned copy of a newspaper from over 70 years ago! As Sophia from the Golden Girls would always say…Picture it: Pittsburgh, 1934.
On November 24th, the Pittsburgh Press reported that the skin of Edith Perry, 32, which had been purple since that Monday, was beginning to come back to its normal color. The doctors of the day thought she had “Internal Poisoning” and said she was now a reddish color and her skin was sensitive as if she had been burned.
It’s a very tiny story and doesn’t have any explanation or intent to follow up as modern stories would. I noticed something else, too. Today’s story would have interviewed the victim or her family, the doctor and probably a neighbor and included a statement from each. It seemed, from the tiny newspaper article, that they reported the news as an interesting tidbit. I think today’s reporters would have made this a bigger story. What do you think?
Have a GRAPE Day!