Before the age of Instagram filters and extreme celebrity skincare regimens, there was Empress Elisabeth of Austria. Better known as 'Sisi,' she accidentally stumbled into becoming the most famous woman in Europe by marrying her cousin, Emperor Franz Joseph I, at the tender age of 16. Despising the stuffy, gossipy atmosphere of the Habsburg court, Sisi rebelled in the most dramatic way possible: by dedicating her entire existence to her looks, morphing into a 19th-century gothic fitness guru with a deeply concerning eating disorder.

Let's talk about her hair. Sisi possessed a glorious, ankle-length mane of chestnut hair that dictated her daily schedule. Brushing it took three hours every single morning—during which she studied Greek and Hungarian—and her highly-paid hairdresser secretly hid fallen strands on a piece of sticky tape under her apron to spare the Empress from a complete meltdown over lost hair. Washing this magnificent beast took an entire day every two weeks, utilizing an unholy, sticky concoction of raw eggs and cognac.

Her waistline was famously clamped down to a jaw-dropping 19.5 inches (and often less). To maintain this, Sisi went on extreme diets that sound like a modern horror story, subsisting primarily on salted raw egg whites, raw beef broth, and milk provided by her own personal herd of cows that traveled with her on vacations. She also installed gymnastics rings in all her royal palaces—much to the absolute horror of her aristocratic in-laws—and subjected her poor ladies-in-waiting to grueling eight-hour speed-walks across mountains. If her companions couldn't keep up, she simply left them in the dust.

Sisi's skincare routine was equally unhinged. She regularly went to sleep with a leather mask strapped to her face, lined with crushed strawberries or—most notoriously—thick slices of raw veal. She took daily baths in warm olive oil to keep her skin supple, and slept without a pillow to prevent facial wrinkles, often tying damp cloths around her waist to shrink her stomach while she rested.

Her obsession with a tiny waist ultimately became the most bizarre detail of her death. In 1898, while walking to a steamer ship in Geneva, an Italian anarchist named Luigi Lucheni rushed up and stabbed her in the chest with a sharpened needle file. Sisi thought she had simply been punched, dusted herself off, and actually boarded the ship before suddenly fainting. It turned out her ultra-tight corset had acted as a pressure bandage, temporarily stopping the internal bleeding from a pierced heart. By the time they unlaced her, Sisi was gone—a tragic, highly fashionable end for history's most fiercely corseted Empress.