One week of decadent grooming has taught me that it's no wonder Marie Antoinette was considered to be so vain. Clegg says that she definitely wasn't unusual or excessive in her grooming habits — quite a few royals were actually more extreme than the Queen of France.

"She has some pretty stiff competition from several other women in French history," notes Clegg. "Most notably, Diane de Poitiers, the influential mistress of Henri II, a remarkable woman who was completely obsessed with maintaining her youthful good looks."

In addition to being credited as the inventor of jogging and practicing strange rituals like peeling an onion near her eyes to make them more luminous, she was also known to have been a regular imbiber of a tonic that contained real gold that she believed would promote a more youthful appearance.

"When her body was recently exhumed, it was found to have high levels of gold in her hair and it’s thought that this rather extreme beauty treatment may even have killed her," says Clegg. Hopefully, all that Goldschläger I downed in college didn't do anything more than just make me question my life choices.