In 1500BC in Egypt, a shaved head was considered the ultimate in feminine beauty. Egyptian women removed every hair from their heads with special gold tweezers and polished their scalps to a high sheen with buffing cloths.

Marie de Medici, a member of that famous Italian family and a 17th-century queen of France, had expensive tastes in clothes. One special dress was outfitted with 39,000 tiny pearls and 3,000 diamonds, and cost the equivalent of 20 million dollars at the time it was made in 1606. She wore it once.

In Elizabethan England, the spoon was such a novelty, such a prized rarity, that people carried their own folding spoons to banquets. (This was true, however, for only the people who were invited to banquets.)