Alie Ward

And we did a cheese episode recently where we talked a little bit about donkey cheese.

Have you ever had donkey milk?

Just a heads up, the history does get cloudy here, but it's fun.

It's horrifying and it's fun.

So

Yeah, Cleopatra was said to have bathed in donkey milk and washed her face with it, but other history nerds assert that a later royal, Nero's wife, Poppaea, was the one who was known for this milk ritual.

Honestly, this woman...

a dunk in ass milk was like the least salacious thing about her life.

Because this wife of Nero, she reportedly cheated on one husband with the Roman emperor Nero, who had killed his mother for the throne and who executed his former wife, who was also his stepsister, and then later killed his son with Poppaea while they were on a fishing trip.

And Poppaea herself may have died at her own husband's hand.

And by that

I mean foot, because he allegedly kicked her in the stomach to death.

So I was just trying to look up donkey milk baths and being like, what the fuck is happening here, people?

Horrifying emperors, but still, why the donkey milk?

And turns out the reason why people with money smeared donkey butter on themselves is kind of simple drugstore chemistry.

So

Let's have a look at the 2015 paper, Epidermal Permeability Barrier in the Treatment of Keratosis Pilaris, which notes that the efficacy for lactic acid in helping exfoliate and replenish skin is known.

So if you've ever gotten little bumps on the back of your arms or just in general in your body, lactic acid can help.

that.

And we learned that lactic acid in our recent microbiome episode is formed when milk sours or ferments, the lactose turns into lactic acid.