Retro celebrity. The Beauty queen Helena Rubinstein

The Beauty queen Helena Rubinstein
In 1950, Helena Rubinstein was one of the richest women in the world. She started with nothing. She had no money, no education, and no one to help her. All she had were 12 jars of face cream and a lot of energy and ambitions. She turned these into a multi million-dollar cosmetics empire. Her statement – “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones”. Helena Rubinstein was born Chaya Rubinstein, just on Christmas, December 25, 1870 in Krakow, Poland. She was the oldest of eight girls. Helena’s mother thought that beauty was very important. She used a special skin cream that a Hungarian chemist made for her. Helena’s mother made all of her daughters use it too.

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Popular depiction of a sati (from an icon shop at the gates of the gates of the Ekling Ji temple). Self-immolation of widows in India

Self-immolation of widows in India
Called sati (suttee), it is a funeral ritual tradition in Hinduism, once widespread in India. According to it, the widow should be burned along with her late husband on a specially built pyre. As of today the tradition of sati is rare and forbidden. The adjective sati means good woman. The name comes from the name of the goddess Sati, also known under the name of Dakshayani that brought a sacrifice, not being able to carry the indignities of her father Daksha’s humiliation of her husband Shiva. The ritual of Sati existed in India for centuries, until in 1829. The British occupied the country declared it illegal. However, it did not help much – the self-immolation continues to this day. Last time the authorities banned the tradition of self-immolation of widows in 1956 and 1981.
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Queen of Pinups Bettie Page (April 22, 1923 – December 11, 2008)

Queen of Pinups Bettie Page
Bettie Page’s life was filled with cult myth, mystery and sadness. The Girl with the Perfect Figure Betty Mae Page was born on April 22, 1923 in Nashville, Tennessee. Betty’s parents divorced when she was 10 years old. She had to take care of her sisters. During the year, she and her sisters lived in an orphanage until their mother had earned money to support the family. With the success of graduating from school, Betty went to college. She was going to be a teacher. But in the fall of 1940 Betty changed the decision and began to engage in acting school. In 1947, Bettie Page moved to New York. Here she was trying to become an actress, but it did not bring any results, and she works as a secretary.
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Beautiful ballerina Michaela DePrince

Beautiful ballerina Michaela DePrince
This story is simply heart touching. Michaela DePrince, born Mabinty Bangura, was orphaned in war-torn Sierra Leone at the age of three, when her father was shot dead and her mother died of starvation. In the orphanage the three-year-old girl had to face tough life. She remembers being called “the devil’s child” and being ill-treated by the orphanage’s carers because she had vitiligo – a skin condition that causes blotches of lightening skin. Children in the orphanage were given numbers ranking them from the most favored to the least. DePrince was ranked 27th out of 27 children. Michaela DePrince was just three years old when she saw a ballerina for the first time. “I was just so fascinated by this person, by how beautiful she was, how she was wearing such a beautiful costume,” she remembers. “So I ripped the cover off and I put it in my underwear.” The girl was told – ‘Black dancers can’t be ballerinas’
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Faiyum portraits first realistic painting on Earth

Faiyum portraits first realistic painting on Earth
These wonderful portraits by unknown artists painted more than 2 thousand years ago, not for viewers and museums, were in fact, a kind of passport photo for afterlife. Egyptians were afraid very much that the gods in the afterlife would not be able to identify them because of the failure of embalming. Such realistic portraits were to be buried with the dead. Currently, there are about 900 funeral portraits found in the necropolis of Faiyum. Thanks to the dry Egyptian climate, many portraits are very well preserved, and, in most cases, even the paint looks still fresh.
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Gemstone meteorite from outer space – one of the greatest finds of the century. Beautiful Gemstone meteorite Fukang

Beautiful Gemstone meteorite Fukang
Noteworthy, it is the most beautiful meteorite ever found on Earth. Thirteen years ago, in 2000 it was found near the Chinese city of Fukang, north-western mountainous region of Xinjiang. The iron meteorite with striking patches of olivine crystals weighed 2.211 kg. These blotches are marked only 1% of all meteorites being found on the surface of the Earth. Gemstone meteorite from outer space was named one of the greatest finds of the century. On February 2005 the meteorite was taken to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. Later the mysterious meteorite was investigated in Meteorite Center, Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona in Tucson. The Fukang pallasite contains large, gem quality olivine, or peridot, in a nickel-iron matrix.
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Monastic festival Tsechu in Bhutan

Monastic festival Tsechu in Bhutan
Paro is a city in western Bhutan with a population of 15 000 inhabitants, located at an altitude of 2,400 meters. Here, richly carved, painted wood distinguishes Paro Dzong, a fortress-monastery in Bhutan that sits above the town of Paro and serves as its religious center. A tiny Buddhist kingdom in the Himalaya, traditionally isolated Bhutan has in recent years become the tourist destination. A balance of playful yellow and passionate red, orange attract attention of hundreds of tourists who arrive in Paro during the annual monastic festivals (Tsechu).
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Сemetery church of All Saints in Czech town of Kutna Hora. Gothic chapel on bones

Gothic chapel on bones
Ossuary in Sedlec (chesh. Kostnice v Sedlci, cemetery church of All Saints with Ossuary) – Gothic chapel in Sedlec, a suburb of the Czech town of Kutna Hora. Noteworthy, human skulls and bones decorate the chapel. On the decoration of the chapel used about 40,000 human skeletons. In 1278, Henry, the abbot of the Cistercian monastery in Sedlec, a suburb of Kutna Mountains, was sent by the Czech King Otakar II to the Holy Land. He brought back some earth from Golgotha ​​and sprinkled it over the abbey cemetery. The news of this spread, and the cemetery has become a popular burial place of the people of Central Europe. Many thousands of people wanted to be buried in this cemetery. As a result of Medieval wars in the middle of XIV century, epidemics expanded greatly, particularly the epidemic of the Black Death.
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Fashion designer and humanitarian Oleg Cassini

Fashion designer and humanitarian Oleg Cassini

Oleg Cassini was born 100 years ago, on April 11, 1913 into a family of a Russian father – diplomat Alexander Loiewski and Italian Countess Marguerite Cassini. Oleg Cassini is remembered not only for being an officially personal couturier for Jackie Kennedy. Oleg Cassini, unlike most fashion designers, was an animal lover and an advocate for animals. Thus, he created collections of man-made fashion fur, the ‘evolutionary furs’. A late convert to animal rights, he blamed himself for the loss of 250,000 leopards killed as women copied a coat he had designed for Jackie Kennedy. He renounced the killing of animals and stuck by his word by introducing micro-fiber fake furs in 1999, a synthetic material that retained the feel, warmth, and fashion of real fur. On his Oyster Bay estate he had eighteen dogs, fifteen cats, thirty goats, six sheep, one half-ton sow, two Vietnamese potbellied pigs, one donkey, two parrots, twenty-two full-size horses, and two miniature horses.
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