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Latest comment: 1 month ago7 comments2 people in discussion
While it has since been claimed that women used belladonna to dilate their pupils in order to appear more attractive, this claim appears to date from much more recently and to conflate earlier sources which described its use for complexion with a later association with dilation of the pupils.
Okay, I see the confusion and why this material was added. The Greeks used it for cosmetic purposes, and later, the Italians used it to appear more attractive. So there are two claims at work. Viriditas (talk) 00:30, 30 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hi. The current version of the article mentions (as it should) the widespread claim about the origin of the name, but no longer mentions that there are good reasons for believing this claim to be incorrect. I think the earlier version did make sense, and that removing it leaves the misleading impression that the widespread claim has no particular evidence against it. My instinct is to revert your edits, but I don't want to risk an edit war with you or anyone else and am open to compromise. I'd appreciate your thoughts on this. Robin S (talk) 15:30, 18 April 2026 (UTC)Reply
It wasn't unsourced when I wrote it: I cited a post from the subreddit r/AskHistorians which provides the main sources from which the misunderstanding appears to have originated and a plausible mechanism for misinterpretation, as well as mentioning some other published authors who had tried to track down an original source for the (likely misinterpreted) claim without success. I understand that Reddit in general is not a reliable source, but this particular subreddit has strong and enforced rules about evidence and speculation, and the post in question was the most complete reliable collation of relevant information I could find after doing a fair amount of research myself. I now see that a later editor simply deleted the citation because it was from Reddit. Robin S (talk) 16:03, 20 April 2026 (UTC)Reply
Yeah, we can't use that. Also, as a Redditor myself, I can tell you that the accuracy of AskHistorians has declined significantly since 2020. It is true the sub was once considered the gold standard, but for whatever reason, it no longer is. But, that's neither here nor there. You have to mine the sources and cite them; we can't use Reddit as a source. It also looks like we are dealing with a lot of primary sources, which presents a further issue. Stick to the secondary sources explaining why these sources are important and you should be fine. Viriditas (talk) 21:58, 23 April 2026 (UTC)Reply
level-5 vital article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
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