La Parle Obesity Soap advertisement, 1903

Wikimedia Commons file record for a 1903 advertisement headed 'Fat is Folly' for La Parle Obesity Soap, promising that fat could be reduced safely and conveniently by ordinary washing, 'without dieting or gymnastics.' The record sources the image to an NPR history-of-weight-loss-gimmicks item and marks the underlying pre-1930 advertisement public domain in the United States. A 2026-07-08 search across the four supported archives (Wellcome Collection, Library of Congress, BnF/Gallica, and Wikimedia Commons) for 'La Parle Obesity Soap 1903', 'Obesity Soap Fat is Folly', and 'Norwood Chemical Company La Parle Obesity Soap' found no holding-institution record for this advertisement; this Commons-only file is therefore recorded as an accepted residual. Used as a neighboring mass-market slimming nostrum artifact in the arsenic-slimming case; it is not an arsenic product and is captioned as a comparator for the same cheap, mail-order body-reduction market.