From about 1700, for reasons that had nothing to do with common sense or practicality, it became fashionably necessary to place on one’s head a daily snowfall of white powder. The main powdering agent was simple flour. When wheat harvests failed in France in the 1770s, there were riots all over as starving people realized that diminished supplies of flour were not being baked into bread, but were instead being used to powder the privileged heads of aristocrats.
