The woman who sold poison as make-up.

The story is told about Giulia Tofana, a woman of seventeenth-century Italy, first in Palermo and later in Rome. What she sold looked like nothing at all: a clear liquid in small flasks, the kind a woman kept on her dressing table among her powders and her scents.

It was called Aqua Tofana. It had no colour, no taste and no smell, and it worked slowly, over days, so that a death looked like an illness. The accounts say it was sold to wives who could not leave their marriages any other way. Divorce did not exist for them. A flask on the dressing table did.

Hidden in plain sight

The disguise was the genius of it. Some versions were said to travel as a cosmetic for the face, others under the label of a holy oil, the so-called manna of Saint Nicholas of Bari. Nobody searches a woman's dressing table. Nobody questions a saint.

How it ended

The tradition says the trade was uncovered in Rome, and that Giulia Tofana was arrested and executed there in 1659, after confessing to having supplied the poison for hundreds of deaths. Historians argue over the numbers, the names and even the dates; much of what we know comes from later retellings. The legend has outlived every one of its doubters.

Why it is here

VENENVM takes its name from the Latin for poison, which was also the word for a love potion. Aqua Tofana is the reason the two belong together: the most dangerous thing in the room was the prettiest bottle on the table.

VENENVM is a fragrance by Luccivo, kept behind a door.

The account of Giulia Tofana is part history, part legend; the details above follow the most commonly told version.