In Japan, for about a thousand years, a grown woman with white teeth looked unfinished, even a little barbaric. The custom was called ohaguro. Girls blackened their teeth when they came of age or married, and from then on black teeth marked them as adults. Court nobles, samurai, courtesans and geisha did it too. The dye was made at home. Pieces of iron were left to soak in tea or vinegar until the liquid turned the color of rust. Then powdered gall from sumac leaves went in, and the mixture turned black. It was warmed and painted on one tooth at a time with a soft feather brush. The great woodblock artist Kitagawa Utamaro made a print of women doing exactly this. According to the dental museum of Japan’s Kanagawa Dental Association, the warm liquid smelled so bad that married women blackened their teeth before their husbands got up. When they traveled, they carried an instant powder version. The look usually came with shaved eyebrows. The British diplomat Algernon Mitford, who met Emperor Meiji in 1868, described the 16-year-old emperor with blackened teeth and shaved eyebrows. Foreigners struggled with it. Ernest Satow, who came to Japan at 18 in 1861, was shocked by the black teeth of the geisha he met in Osaka. In 1870 the new government banned ohaguro for the nobility, but people kept doing it. In March 1873 the empress stopped blackening her teeth, and ordinary women slowly followed. By the 1920s the custom had almost disappeared.