“…I almost fekt sick the first time she unfastened her robe and pulled it down from her shoulders, because the skin there and on her neck was bumpy and yellow like an uncooked chickens’s. The problem, as I later learned, was that in her geisha days she’d used a kind of white makeup we call “China Clay”, made with a base of lead. China Clay turned out to be poisonous, to begin with, which probably accounted in part for Granny’s foul disposition…”
Memoirs of a Geisha
My life in a Book 