Some good life advice: don’t let anyone take a picture of you taking snuff, unless you want to be immortalized as a Victorian nose-picker. 

Snuff is a form of tobacco ground into a fine powder, taken by snorting a little pinch up one’s nose. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it was a luxury only the rich could afford.

So in these pictures, the posh ladies are trying to demonstrate their social standing by posing with a status symbol. But by trying to look more important than the inferior tobacco-smoking peasants, they just ended up looking like their snooty noses were teeming with boogers.

Images via Tara McGinley on Dangerous Minds, Wellcome Library and the Wellcome Collection.

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