Milk bath Milk bath A milk bath is a bath taken in milk instead of water. Often other scents such as honey, rose, lavender and essential oils are added. Milk baths use lactic acid, an alpha hydroxy acid, to dissolve the proteins which hold together dead skin cells. There are legends that Cleopatra bathed in donkey milk daily for her complexion. These legends have not been confirmed and some historians believe that Roman Empress Poppaea set this bathing fashion after Cleopatra's death. Queens Catherine Parr and later Elizabeth I of England used milk baths to make their skin appear more youthful and
Complexion lie in very intimate relationship to one another. Their opposite powers alternately conquer and become conquered until a quality is reached which is uniform throughout the whole: this is the complexion.” As Matthew Simon writes, “Since it served as a fundamental concept, not only in physiology but also in pathology and therapy, complexion theory provided important support for the idea that medicine constituted a unified and rational body of knowledge.” By observation and judgment, medieval physicians determined the proper complexion of the individual when healthy. The body was healthy when all was in balance, but diagnosis was difficult, as there