Shropshire's super smooth ancient Romans were 'trendsetters' of hair removal
They've given us medicine, sanitation, education, the roads, the fresh water system and public order – but what have the Romans really ever done for us?
Well, according to experts at English Heritage, they popularised the painful practice of removing unwanted hair from the body by plucking it out with a tweezer.
The no-body-hair trend can be traced back as far as ancient Rome, with large collections of tweezers recently having been found at Wroxeter Roman City, near Shrewsbury.
More than 400 artefacts are now on display at the museum which relate to Roman cleanliness and other beauty practices, including a strigil (for skin scraping), perfume and oil bottles, jet and bone jewellery, make-up applicators, figurines of deities and amulets to ward off evil.
Wroxeter Roman City and the new museum will open to the public on Thursday.
Cameron Moffett, English Heritage curator at Wroxeter Roman City, said: “At Wroxeter alone we have discovered more than 50 pairs of tweezers, one of the largest collections of this item in Britain, indicating that it was a popular accessory.
