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Monday, May 10, 2010

362. Fair and Lovely?



What you see in the picture is a practice (X) of cleaning and thickening fabrics such as wool by beating it with the foot. By the medieval period, a material (Y) occurring in nature was discovered to be pretty effective in doing this cleaning up, and gradually replaced the manual process to a large extent. As a consequence the material Y came to be named after the process X that it replaced.

Nowadays this material typically surfaces in stuff that the fairer sex smears on their faces.

Identify the material Y.

1 comment:

Shrey Goyal said...

Fulling; Fuller's Earth