31 Of The Most Bizarre Trends Of The 50s And 60s

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Giving your house a shiny coat of…wait for it…lead paint!

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These days, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who would willingly cover their house in coats of cancer-inducing, nervous system-and-kidney-damaging, systemic-poisoning lead-based paint. But, that wasn’t the case in the 1950s and 1960s, where a great percentage (the US Environmental Protection Agency puts the figure at a whopping 69% of homes built between 1940 to the end of the 1950s!) of homes were painted with the stuff. Lead was commonly mixed into paint to speed up the drying process, increase durability, mitigate corrosion caused by moisture, and to help paint look fresher and more vibrant for longer. It was often used not only on the exterior surfaces of homes, but also in the interiors—on walls, balustrades, window sills, and other areas of the dwelling place. As such, if you buy an older house, you will need to chip off the old paint and give the area a fresh coat, to be on the safe side—especially if you have kids. Lead was banned from being added to house paints in the US in 1978, though other types of paint, such as those used for road markings, may still incorporate the substance.

Toxic homes were not limited to paint jobs, back then. The next slide will clue you in.