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Title: The ugly-girl papers
or, Hints for the toilet
Author: S. D. Power
Release date: February 2, 2025 [eBook #75279]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Harper & Brothers, 1874
Credits: Carla Foust and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UGLY-GIRL PAPERS ***
[Illustration:
UGLY-GIRL PAPERS
FROM
HARPERS BAZAR
]
_REPRINTED FROM “HARPER’S BAZAR.”_
THE
UGLY-GIRL PAPERS;
OR,
HINTS FOR THE TOILET.
[Illustration]
_NEW YORK_:
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS,
FRANKLIN SQUARE.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by
HARPER & BROTHERS,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
TO
AUNT SUSAN,
THE DEAR AND HANDSOME OLD LADY WHO NEVER
NEEDED ANY OF THESE RECIPES,
LET ME OFFER MY FIRST BOOK.
S. D. P.
PREFACE.
By means of these scattered chapters the writer has come to know women
better--their traditions, desires, and delights. If through these pages
women should know themselves and what they may become in regard and
temper for their lovers, friends, children, and their own sakes, it
will well reward the pleasant labor which has already met such kind
appreciation. Begun by chance, to make an agreeable article or two for
_Harper’s Bazar_, the “Ugly-Girl Papers” were continued by request, and
have brought the writer into friendly bearings with many of the readers
of the _Bazar_. To their questions and hints these chapters owe more of
their value than appears on the surface; and the little book goes out
hoping to meet, if not new friends, at least some old ones.
The science of the toilet is well-nigh as delicate as that of medicine;
and as no prescription has yet proved a specific for disease, no recipe
can reach all cases of complexion. I could wish for this book the
good-will and consideration of physicians, under whose advice it may be
hoped its suggestions will approve themselves of wide service.
S. D. P.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
Woman’s Business to be Beautiful.--How to Acquire a Clear
Complexion.--Regimen for Purity of the Blood.--Carbonate
of Ammonia and Powdered Charcoal.--Stippled Skins.--Face
Masks.--Oily Complexions.--Irritations of the
Skin.--Lettuce as a Cosmetic.--Cooling
Drinks.--Sun-Baths.--Bread and Molasses Page 9
CHAPTER II.
Care of the Hair.--Children’s Hair.--When to Cut it.--Ammonia
Washes.--Glycerine and Ammonia.--Pomades.--How to Brush the
Hair.--Cutting the Ends.--German Method of Treating the
Hair.--Southernwood Pomade.--Hair-Dyes.--Dyeing the Eyebrows
and Eyelashes.--Superfluous Hair.--Depilatories.--Washes for
the Eyelashes and Eyebrows 22
CHAPTER III.
Elegance of Manner.--Grace of the Latin Races.--The
Secret of Grace.--Gliding Movement.--Calisthenics.--Erectness
of Figure.--Shoulder Braces.--How to Acquire Sloping
Shoulders.--Care of the Feet.--The Art of Walking.--Picturesque
Carriage of Southern Women 35
CHAPTER IV.
N. P. Willis as a Critic of Beauty.--The Perfume of the
Presence.--Charm of Good Circulation.--Chills are Incipient
Congestion.--Paper Clothing.--Luxuries of the Bath.--A
Substitute for Sea-Baths.--To Secure Fragrant Breath.--Delicate
Dentifrices.--Fine Cologne.--A List of Fragrance 48
CHAPTER V.
Morals of Paint and Powder.--Antique Toilet Arts.--Washington
Ladies.--Making Up the Face.--Whitening the Arms.--Tints of
Rouge.--To Make French Rouge.--Milk of Roses.--Greuze
Tints.--Coarse Complexions Caused by Powder.--Color for the
Lips.--Crystal and Gold Hair Powder.--Dyeing Blonde Wigs.--To
Darken the Hair.--Champagne and Black-Walnut Bark.--Doom of the
Complexion Artist 59
CHAPTER VI.
Récamier’s Training.--Diana of Poitiers’ Bath.--High Beauty of
Maturity.--The Worth of Beauty.--George Eliot on
Complexions.--Dr. Cazenave.--Barley Paste for the
Face.--Prescriptions of the Roman Ladies.--To Remove
Pimples.--Cascarilla Wash.--Varnish for Wrinkles.--Acetic Acid
for Comedones.--To Remove Mask.--Lady Mary Montagu.--Habit of
Italian Ladies.--Wash of Vitriol 70
CHAPTER VII.
Shining Pallor.--Lustrous Faces.--Golden Freckles.--Tiger-Lily
Spots.--Sun Photographs.--Nitre Removes Freckles.--Old English
Prescription.--For Yachting.--Almond-Oil.--Buttermilk as a
Cosmetic.--Rosemary and Glycerine.--Lotion for Prickly
Heat.--For Musquitoes.--Protecting Hair from Sea
Air.--Fashionable Gray Hair.--Dark Eyes and Silver Hair.--To
Restore Dark Hair.--Bandoline.--Cold Cream.--Almond Pomade.--For
Skin Diseases.--Sulphurous Acid 77
CHAPTER VIII.
Service of Beauty.--Not for Vanity, but Perfection.--Eyebrows
of Petrarch’s Laura.--Fashionable Baths.--Trimming the
Eyelashes.--Luxury of the Toilet.--Its Magnetic Influence.--A
Safe Stimulant.--Amateurs of the Toilet.--Cosmetic Gloves.--To
Refine the Skin of the Shoulders and Arms.--Sulphate of Quinine
for the Hair.--For the Eyebrows and Eyelashes.--A Harmless
Dye.--To Remove Sallowness.--A Hint for Stout People.--Perfumed
Bathing-powder 86
CHAPTER IX.
Hope for Homely People.--Two Vital Charms.--The Way to
Live.--Sunrise and Open Air.--Bleached by the Dawn.--Live at
Sunny Windows.--In Balconies and Parks.--Christiana’s
Breakfast.--Brown Steak and Good-humor.--True Bread.--Device
for Stiff Shoulders.--Corsets and Girdles.--The Latter more
Needed.--How to be Pleased with One’s Self 95
CHAPTER X.
The Bonniest Kate in Christendom.--A Word to Mothers and
Aunts.--Different Vanities.--The Sorrows of Ugly
Women.--Recipes of an Ancient Beauty.--Sand Wash.--Color for
the Nails.--Embrocation for the Hands.--Soap to Bleach the
Arms.--Freckle Lotions.--Artistic Enthusiasm at the Toilet 108
CHAPTER XI.
A Dark Potion.--Olive-oil and Tar for the Face.--Olive-tar for
Inhalation.--Carbolic Lotion for Pimples.--Cure for Musquito
Bites.--Pale Blondes.--A French Marquise.--Deepening Colors by
Sunlight.--Seductive Cosmetics.--Nose-machine.--Finger Thimbles 117
CHAPTER XII.
Removal of Superfluous Hair.--Effects of High Living.--Work of
Typhoid Fever.--Roman Tweezers.--Lola Montez’s Recipes.--Paste
of Wood-ashes.--Bleaching Arms with Chloride.--Cautions about
Depilatories.--Public Baths.--Improving Complexions by the
Sulphur Vapor-bath.--How Arabian Women Perfume
Themselves.--Profuse Hair, Sign of Nature’s Bounty 125
CHAPTER XIII.
Madame Celnart’s Works of the Toilet.--Literature of
Beauty.--Cares of the Toilet.--Arts of Coiffure and
Lacing.--How to Hold a Needle Gracefully.--Iris Powder for
Tresses.--Arts of Italian Women.--Depilatory used in
Harems.--Spirit of Pyrêtre.--Herbs used by Greek
Women.--Mexican Pomade.--Dusky Perfumed Marbles.--Lost
Perfumes.--Sultanas’ Lotion.--Brilliant Paste for Neck and
Arms.--Baking Enamel 134
CHAPTER XIV.
The Last of the Rose.--Weighing in the Balances.--To Love and to
be Loved.--The Enigma of Love.--Its Power over the Lot of
Men.--Inspiration in the Looks.--The Land of Spring.--The
Duchess of Devonshire.--Women at and after Thirty.--Training of
Emotion.--Warming the Voice.--Crow’s-feet at the
Opera.--Bohemian Arsenic Waters.--Recipe from Madame
Vestris.--Milk of Roses.--Sweet-oils.--Opera-dancers’
Prescription for Restoring Suppleness 146
CHAPTER XV.
The Fearful Malady of which no one Dies.--_Esprit
Odontalgique._--Gray Pastilles.--Important to Smokers.--Mouth
Perfumes.--Care of the Breath.--Directions for
Bathing.--Perfumes for the Bath.--Bazin’s _Pâte_.--Quality of
Soaps.--Bathing and Anointing the Feet.--Nicety of
Stockings.--Delicate Shoe Linings.--Feet of Pauline Bonaparte 155
CHAPTER XVI.
“The Leaves are Full of Joy.”--Nobility of the Body.--Its
Possibilities.--Brain and Heart Dependent on it.--Physical
Culture Imperative in America.--Our Contempt of Health.--Easier
to be Magnificent than Clean.--Distilled Water for Every
Use.--Substitute for Stills.--Vapor and Sulphur Baths.--Bran
Baths.--Oatmeal for the Hands.--Frequency of Baths.--Remedies
for Hepatic Spots 165
CHAPTER XVII.
The Banting System.--A Quaint Author.--Trials of
Corpulency.--Result of Living on Sixpence a Day.--Indifference
of Doctors.--A Wise Surgeon.--Relation of Glucose to
Obesity.--Diet for Stout People.--No Starch, no Sugar.--Losing
Flesh at the Rate of a Pound a Week.--“Human
Beans.”--Humors of Banting’s Tract.--His Gratitude.--Honors to
Dr. Harvey.--One Day with Dives, the Next with
Lazarus.--Bromide of Ammonia 175
CHAPTER XVIII.
A Letter.--Trials of a Plain Woman.--The Best Husband in the
World.--Burdock Wash for the Hair.--For Children’s Hair.--Oil
of Mace as a Stimulant.--To Restore Color to the
Hair.--Sperm-oil a Powerful Hair Restorer.--The Cheapest
Hair-Dye.--Cure for Chilblains.--Loose Shoes the Cause of
Corns.--Pyroligneous Acid for Corns.--Turpentine and Carbolic
Acid for Soft Corns 185
CHAPTER XIX.
A Talk about Complexions.--Delicate Lotion.--Cause of Rough
Faces.--Sun Painting and Bleaching.--Court Ladies Refusing to
Wash their Faces.--Experiments with Olive-tar.--Consumption
and Clear Faces.--Rev. W. H. H. Murray on Olive-tar.--Porcelain
Women.--Drawing Humors to the Surface.--What is to be Done for
the Weak Women? 192
CHAPTER XX.
Sulphur Baths.--Bleaching Old Faces.--Experiments in
Bathing.--Cautions.--Need of Public Baths.--Their Proper
Prices.--Method of Giving Sulphur Vapor-baths.--Hot Baths for
Hot Weather.--Russian Baths at Home.--Improvements Needed in
Public Baths.--What they Should be.--What they Are.--The
Russian Vapor-bath.--After-Sensations.--Brightness and
Lightness of Health.--Reverence for the Physical.--Influence of
Bathing on the Nerves and Passions.--Necessity of Public Baths 198
CHAPTER XXI.
Devices of Uneasy Age.--Bread Paste and Court-plaster to Conceal
Wrinkles.--Accepting the Situation.--Plain Women and Agreeable
Toilets.--Examples.--The Rector’s Daughter.--Dressing on Two
Hundred a Year.--Écru Linen and White Nansook.--A Senator’s
Wife.--A Washington Success.--Dull, Thin Faces.--Hay-colored
Hair.--Advantages of Lining Rooms with Mirrors 212
CHAPTER XXII.
Physical Education of Girls.--A Woman’s Value in the
World.--High-bred Figures.--Antique Races.--Inspiration
of Art not Vanity.--The Trying Age.--Dress, Food, and Bathing
for Young Girls.--A Veto on Close Study.--Braces and
Backboards.--Never Talk of Girls’ Feelings.--Exercise for the
Arms.--Singing Scales with Corsets off.--Development of the
Bust.--Open-work Corsets the Best.--The Bayaderes of India and
their Forms.--The Delicacy due Young Girls.--A Frank but Needed
Caution.--Care of the Figure after Nursing 224
CHAPTER XXIII.
Hands and Complexions.--Preparing for Parties.--Refining
Rough Faces.--Carbolic Baths.--Chalk and
Cascarilla.--Glycerine Wash.--School-girls’ Flushed Hands and
Faces.--To Soften the Hands.--Red Noses.--Secrets of
Making-up.--Cologne for the Eyes.--Cosmetic Gloves.--To
Impart a Brilliant Complexion 238
CHAPTER XXIV.
Women’s Looks and Nerves.--A Low-toned Generation.--Children
and their Ways.--Brief Madness.--Women in the
Woods.--Singing.--Work well done the Easiest.--Sleep the Remedy
for Temper.--Hours for Sleep.--The Great Medicines--Sunshine,
Music, Work, and Sleep 247
CHAPTER XXV.
Changing Wigs and Chignons.--Matching Braids.--Frizzing the
Hair.--Crimping-pins.--Blonde Hair-pins.--What Colors
Hair.--Bleaching Tresses.--Sulphur Paste.--Foxy
Locks.--Freshening Switches 257
CHAPTER XXVI.
Hair and Complexion.--Black Dyes.--Persian Blue-Black.--Peroxide
of Hydrogen.--Chloride of Gold.--Transient Dyes 267
THE UGLY-GIRL PAPERS.
CHAPTER I.
Woman’s Business to be Beautiful.--How to Acquire a Clear
Complexion.--Regimen for Purity of the Blood.--Carbonate
of Ammonia and Powdered Charcoal.--Stippled Skins.--Face
Masks.--Oily Complexions.--Irritations of the Skin.--Lettuce as a
Cosmetic.--Cooling Drinks.--Sun-Baths.--Bread and Molasses.
The first requisite in a woman toward pleasing others is that she
should be pleased with herself. In no other way can she attain that
self-poise, that satisfaction, which leaves her at liberty to devote
herself successfully to others.
I appeal to the ugly sisterhood to know if this is not so. Could a
woman be made to believe herself beautiful, it would go far toward
making her so. Those hopeless, shrinking souls, alive with devotion
and imagination, with hearts as fit to make passionate and worshiped
lovers, or steadfast and inspiring heroines, as the fairest Venus of
the sex, need not for an instant believe there is no alleviation for
their case, no chance of making face and figure more attractive and
truer exponents of the spirit within.
There is scarcely any thing in the history of women more touching
than the homage paid to beauty by those who have it not. No slave
among her throng of adorers appreciated more keenly the beauty of
Récamier than the skeleton-like, irritable Madame De Chateaubriand.
The loveliness of a rival eats into a girl’s heart like corrosion;
every fair curling hair, every grace of outline, is traced in lines of
fire on the mind of the plainer one, and reproduced with microscopic
fidelity. It is a woman’s business to be beautiful. She recommends
every virtue and heroism by the grace which sets them forth. Women of
genius are the first to lay the crown of womanhood on the head of the
most beautiful. Mere fashion of face and form are not meant by beauty,
but that symmetry and brightness which come of physical and spiritual
refinement. Such are the heroines of Scott, Disraeli, and Bulwer, as
inspiring as they are rare. Toward such ideals all women yearn.
Who will say that this most natural feeling of the feminine heart may
not have some fulfillment in the first thirty years of life? This limit
is given because the latest authorities in social science assert that
woman’s prime of youth is twenty-six, moving the barriers a good ten
years ahead from the old standard of the novelist, whose heroines are
always in the dew of sixteen. In the very first place, one may boldly
say that beauty, or rather fascination, is not a matter of youth, and
no woman ought to sigh over her years till she feels the frost creeping
into her heart. Men of the world understand well that a woman’s wit
is finest, and her heart yields the richest wealth, when experience
has formed the fair and colorless material of youth. A sweet girl of
seventeen and a high-bred beauty of thirty, if well preserved, may
dispute the palm. I do not mean to decry rose-buds and dew. One hardly
knows which to love them for most--their loveliness or their briefness.
But women who look their thirties in the face should not lay down the
sceptre of life, or fancy that its delights for them are over. They are
young while they seem young.
Then we may boldly set about renovating the outward form, sure that
Nature will respond to our efforts. The essence of beauty is health;
but all apparently healthy people are not fair. The type of the system
must be considered in treatment. The brunette is usually built up
of much iron, and the bilious secretion is sluggish. The blonde is
apt to be dyspeptic, and subject to disturbances of the blood. From
these causes result freckles, pimples, and that coarse, indented skin
_stippled_ with punctures, like the tissue of pig-skin--a fault of
many otherwise clear complexions.
The fairest skins belong to people in the earliest stage of
consumption, or those of a scrofulous nature. This miraculous clearness
and brilliance is due to the constant purgation which wastes the
consumptive, or to the issue which relieves the system of impurities
by one outlet. We must secure purity of the blood by less exhaustive
methods. The diet should be regulated according to the habit of
the person. If stout, she should eat as little as will satisfy her
appetite; never allowing herself, however, to rise from the table
hungry. A few days’ resolute denial will show how much really is
needed to keep up the strength. When recovering from severe nervous
prostration, years ago, the writer found her appetite gone. The least
morsel satisfied hunger, and more produced a repugnance she never tried
to overcome. She resumed study six hours a day and walked two miles
every day from the suburbs to the centre of the city, and back again.
Breakfast usually was a small saucer of strawberries and one Graham
cracker, and was not infrequently dispensed with altogether. Lunch was
half an orange--for the burden of eating the other half was not to be
thought of; and at six o’clock a handful of cherries formed a plentiful
dinner. Once a week she did crave something like beef-steak or soup,
and took it. But, guiding herself wholly by appetite, she found with
surprise that her strength remained steady, her nerves grew calm, and
her ability to study was never better. This is no rule for any one,
farther than to say persons of well-developed physique need not fear
any limitation of diet for a time which does not tell on the strength
and is approved by appetite. Never eat too much; never go hungry.
For weak digestion nothing is so relished or strengthens so much as the
rich beef tea, or rather gravy, prepared from the beef-jelly sold by
first-rate grocers. This is very different from the extracts of beef
made by chemists. The condensed beef prepared by the same companies
which send out the condensed milk is preferable, in all respects, as
to taste and nourishment. A table-spoonful of this jelly, dissolved by
pouring a cup of boiling water on it, and drank when cool, will give as
much strength as three fourths of a pound of beef-steak broiled. For
singers and students, who need a light but strengthening diet, nothing
is so admirable.
Nervous people, and sanguine ones, should adopt a diet of eggs, fish,
soups, and salads, with fruit. This cools the blood, and leaves the
strength to supply the nerves instead of taxing them to digest heavy
preparations. Lymphatic people should especially prefer such lively
salads as cress, pepper-grass, horseradish, and mustard. These are
nature’s correctives, and should appear on the table from March to
November, to be eaten not merely as relishes, but as stimulating and
beneficial food. They stir the blood, and clear the eye and brain
from the humors of spring. Nervous people should be more sparing of
these fiery delights, and eat abundantly of golden lettuce, which
contains opium in its most delicate and least injurious state. The
question of fat meat does not seem satisfactorily settled. I should
compound by using rich soups which contain the essence of meats, and
supply carbon by salad-oil and a free use of nuts or cream. Plump, fair
people may let oily matters of all kinds carefully alone. Thin ones
should eat vegetables--if they can find a cook who knows how to make
them palatable. It is strange that in this country, which produces the
finest vegetables, fit for the envy of foreign cooks, not one out of
a hundred knows how to prepare them properly. People who are anxious
to be rid of flesh should choose acids, lemons, limes, and tamarinds,
eat sparingly of dry meats, with crackers instead of bread, and follow
strictly the advice now given.
To clear the complexion or reduce the size, the blood must be
carefully cleansed. Two simple chemicals should appear on every
toilet-table--the carbonate of ammonia and powdered charcoal. No
cosmetic has more frequent uses than these. The ammonia must be kept in
glass, with a glass stopper, from the air. French charcoal is preferred
by physicians, as it is more finely ground, and a large bottle of it
should be kept on hand. In cases of debility and all wasting disorders
it is valuable. To clear the complexion, take a teaspoonful of charcoal
well mixed in water or honey for three nights, then use a simple
purgative to remove it from the system. It acts like calomel, with
no bad effects, purifying the blood more effectually than any thing
else. But some simple aperient must not be omitted, or the charcoal
will remain in the system, a mass of festering poison, with all the
impurities it absorbs. After this course of purification, tonics may be
used. Many people seem not to know that protoxide of iron, medicated
wine, and “bracing” medicines are useless when the impurities remain
in the blood. The use of charcoal is daily better understood by our
best physicians, and it is powerful, and simple enough to be handled
by every household. The purifying process, unless the health is
unusually good, must be repeated every three months. We absorb in bad
food and air more unprofitable matter than nature can throw off in
that time. If diet and atmosphere were perfect, no such aid would be
needed; but it is the choice between a very great and a small evil in
existing conditions. A free use of tomatoes and figs is, by the way,
recommended, to maintain a healthy condition of the stomach, and the
seeds of either should _not_ be discarded.
The most troublesome task is to refine a _stippled_ skin whose
oil-glands are large and coarse. There may not be a pimple or freckle
on the face, and the temples may be smooth, but the nose and cheeks
look like a pin-cushion from which the pins have just been drawn.
Patience and many applications are necessary, for one must, in fact,
renew the skin.
The worst face may be softened by wearing a mask of quilted cotton
wet in cold water at night. Roman ladies used poultices of bread and
asses’ milk for the same purpose; but water, and especially distilled
water, is all that is needful. A small dose of taraxacum every other
night will assist in refining the skin. But it will be at least a six
weeks’ work to effect the desired change; and it will be a zealous girl
who submits to the discomfort of the mask for that length of time. The
result pays. The compress acts like a mild but imperceptible blister,
and leaves a new skin, soft as an infant’s. Bathing oily skins with
camphor dries the oil somewhat, when the camphor would parch nice
complexions. The opium found in the stalks of flowering lettuce refines
the skin singularly, and may be used clear, instead of the soap which
sells so high. Rub the milky juice collected from broken stems of
coarse garden lettuce over the face at night, and wash with a solution
of ammonia in the morning.
Blondes who are unbeautiful are apt to have divers irritations of the
skin, which their darker neighbors do not know. People of this type
also have a tendency to acid stomachs, the antidote for which is a
dose of ammonia, say one quarter of a spoonful in half a glass of
water, taken every night and morning. This also prevents decay of the
teeth and sweetens the breath, and is less injurious than the soda
and magnesia many ladies use for acid stomachs. In summer the system
should be kept cool by bathing at night and morning, and by tart drinks
containing cream of tartar. Small quantities of nitre, prescribed
by the physician, may be taken by very sanguine persons who suffer
with heat; but pale complexions should seek the sun when its power is
not too great, and be careful, of all things, to avoid a chill. This
deadens the skin, paints blue circles round the eyes, and leaves the
hands an uncertain color.
These precautions may seem burdensome, but they all have been practiced
by those who prize beauty. Nothing is so attractive, so suggestive
of purity of mind and excellence of body, as a clear, fine-grained
skin. Strong color is not desirable. Tints, rather than colors, best
please the refined eye in the complexion. Some mothers are so anxious
to secure this grace for their daughters that they are kept on the
strictest diet from childhood. The most dazzling Parian could not be
more beautiful than the cheek of a child I once saw who was kept on
oatmeal porridge for this effect. At a boarding-school, I remember, a
fashionable mother gave strict injunctions that her daughter should
touch nothing but brown bread and syrup. This was hard fare; but the
carmine lips and magnolia brow of the young lady were the envy of her
schoolmates, who, however, were not courageous enough to attempt such a
régime for themselves.
CHAPTER II.
Care of the Hair.--Children’s Hair.--When to Cut it.--Ammonia
Washes.--Glycerine and Ammonia.--Pomades.--How to Brush the
Hair.--Cutting the Ends.--German Method of Treating the
Hair.--Southernwood Pomade.--Hair-Dyes.--Dyeing the Eyebrows and
Eyelashes.--Superfluous Hair.--Depilatories.--Washes for the
Eyelashes and Eyebrows.
St. Paul approved himself no less a connoisseur of female beauty than
a censor of decorum when he wrote, “If a woman have long hair, it
is a glory to her.” This is in no wise inconsistent with the other
apostolic passage which discourages ornate hair-dressing, for abundant
shining hair needs less care to arrange than a scanty crop that must be
disposed to the best advantage. The woman whose magnificent chevelure
reaches to her waist, thick as one’s wrist when tightly bound, needs
no braid nor cataract, finger-puff nor snow-curl, nor band of gold or
amber to crown herself. Every girl ought to have such hair. Mothers
should remember that such gifts of nature form a dowry which has no
little weight in the incidents of a woman’s life, and should cultivate
assiduously the locks of their daughters. It is not best to keep them
closely cut: after five years they should never be touched by scissors,
save to clip the ends once a month, as hereafter explained, but should
be smoothly braided in long Marguerite plaits, the most convenient
style, unless the mother is ambitious of seeing her pet’s hair in
curls. Hardly any locks will resist good discipline, if taken in the
downy stage of infancy and submitted to papillotes. It is a mistaken
notion that a luxuriant growth of hair in childhood weakens the head.
Nature is not in the habit of providing superfluities. The Breton
women are noted for their magnificent hair, which is allowed to grow
from childhood. The barbarity of the fine comb should be abolished in
civilized nurseries, and a daily or semi-weekly wash with ammonia or
soap substituted, with a thorough brushing afterward. A child’s head is
too tender for any rasping process; even knotted snarls should be cut
rather than pulled out. Send tow-headed children into the sun as much
as possible, that its rays may affect every particle of the iron in the
blood, and change the flaxen colors to more agreeable shades.
When the hair has been neglected, cut it to an even length, and wash
the scalp nightly with soft water into which ammonia has been poured.
This may be as strong as possible at first, so that it does not burn
the skin. Afterward the proportions may be three large spoonfuls of
ammonia to a basin of water. Apply with a brush, stirring the hair well
while the head is partially immersed. Do this at night, so that it may
have a chance to dry, for nothing is so disagreeable as hair put up wet
and turned musty. Wring and wipe it thoroughly, then comb and shake out
the tresses in a draft of air till nearly dry, when it may be done
up in a cotton net. Night-caps heat the head and injure hair. Ammonia
is the most healthful and efficient stimulus known for the hair, and
quickens its growth when nothing else will do so. A healthy system will
supply oil enough for the hair if the head is kept clean. If the scalp
is unnaturally dry, a mixture of half an ounce of carbonate of ammonia
in a pint of sweet-oil makes the most esteemed hair invigorator.
Glycerine and ammonia make a delicate dressing for the hair, and will
not soil the nicest bonnet. Pomades of all kinds are voted vulgar, and
justly. The only excuse for their use is just before entering a sea
bath, when a thorough oiling of the hair prevents injury from salt
water. It should be speedily washed off with a dilution of ammonia.
When a growth of young hair is established, it ought to lengthen at
least eight inches a year in a vigorous subject. Hair is an index of
vitality. The women of the tropics, with their abounding health, have
luxuriant chevelures. Among Spanish and South American women hair a
yard long, in a coil as thick as the wrist, is the rule, and not the
exception. The warmth of those latitudes favors the secretions, and
stimulates every organ to its fullest development. To obtain like
results, we must try to obtain the same conditions of luxuriant health.
A good circulation is essential to fineness and pleasing color of the
hair. The scalp must be stimulated by frequent brushing, as well as by
the ammonia bath. A lady of fashion decreed one hundred strokes of the
brush to be given her celebrated locks daily, and those who have tried
the experiment find that it is not at all too much. Given quickly,
this number occupies three minutes in bestowing, and surely this is
little enough time to give a fine head of hair. Once a month the ends
of the hair should be cut, to remove the forked ends, which stop its
growth. The patrons of a certain New York school of high repute will
remember the young daughter of an Albany gentleman, whose wonderful
hair was the pride of the establishment. The child was about ten years
old, and her heavy tresses reached literally to the floor. She was not
unfrequently shown to visitors as a phenomenon, veiled in this flood of
hair. On inquiry, it was found that no peculiar treatment was given it
beyond cutting the ends regularly every month for years.
An old authority gives the following as the German method of treating
the hair. The women of that country are known to have remarkably
luxuriant locks: Once in two weeks wash the head with a quart of soft
water in which a handful of bran has been boiled and a little white
soap dissolved. Next rub the yolk of an egg slightly beaten into
the roots of the hair; let it remain a few minutes, and wash it off
thoroughly with pure water, rinsing the head well. Wipe and rub the
hair dry with a towel, and comb it up from the head, parting it with
the fingers. In winter do all this near the fire. Have ready some soft
pomatum of beef marrow, boiled with a little almond or olive-oil,
flavored with mild perfume. Rub a small quantity of this on the skin of
the head after it has been washed as above. This may be efficient, but
in this age women prefer the cleanlier method of stimulating the hair
without pomade.
If any ladies are as fond of stirring up cosmetics and washes as were
the wife and daughters of the Vicar of Wakefield, they may try these
highly recommended recipes:
The following is said to be an excellent curling fluid: Put two pounds
of common soap cut small into three pints of spirits of wine, and
melt together, stirring with a clean piece of wood; add essence of
ambergris, citron, and neroli, about a quarter of an ounce of each.
Rowland’s Macassar Oil for the hair: Take a quarter of an ounce of the
clippings of alkanet root, tie this in a bit of coarse muslin, and
suspend it in a jar containing eight ounces of sweet-oil for a week,
covering from the dust. Add to this sixty drops of the tincture of
cantharides, ten drops of oil of rose, neroli and lemon each sixty
drops. Let these stand three weeks closely corked, and you will have
one of the most powerful stimulants for the growth of the hair ever
known.
Take a pound and a half of southernwood and boil it, slightly bruised,
in a quart of old olive-oil, with half a pint of port-wine or spirit.
When thoroughly boiled, strain the oil carefully through a linen cloth.
Repeat the operation three times with fresh southernwood, and add two
ounces of bear’s grease or fresh lard. Apply twice a week to the hair,
and brush it in well.
Where a hair-dye is deemed essential, the deplorable want may be met by
this recipe, which has the merit of being less harmful than most of the
nostrums in use: Boil equal parts of vinegar, lemon juice, and powdered
litharge for half an hour, over a slow fire, in a porcelain-lined
vessel. Wet the hair with this decoction, and in a short time it will
turn black.
Lola Montez gives a hair-dye which is said to be instantaneous, and
as harmless as any mineral dye used. It is made from gallic acid, ten
grains; acetic acid, one ounce; tincture of sesquichloride of iron,
one ounce. Dissolve the gallic acid in the sesquichloride, and add the
acetic acid. Wash the hair with soap and water, and apply the dye by
dipping a fine comb in it and drawing through the hair so as to color
the roots thoroughly. Let it dry; oil and brush.
White lashes and eyebrows are so disagreeably suggestive that one can
not blame their possessor for disguising them by a harmless device.
A decoction of walnut-juice should be made in the season, and kept
in a bottle for use the year round. It is to be applied with a small
hair-pencil to the brows and lashes, turning them to a rich brown,
which harmonizes with fair hair. It may be applied to the edge of the
hair about the face and neck, when that is paler than the rest. Let
me repeat that the best remedy for ill-used tresses is strict care;
glossy, vitalized tresses, kept in order by constant brushing, assume
by degrees a better color. It is a mistake to soak red hair with oil
in the hope of making it darker; it should be kept wavy and light
as possible, to show off the rich lights and shadows with which it
abounds. The sun has a good effect on obnoxious shades of hair if it is
otherwise well attended to, and red or white locks should be worn in
floating masses, waved by fine plaiting at night, or by crimping-pins,
which _do not_ injure hair unless worn too tight. Pale hair shows a
want of iron in the system, and this is to be supplied by a free use
of beef-steaks, soups, pure beef gravies, and red wines. Salt-water
bathing strengthens the system, and acts favorably on the hair. As to
color, hardly any shade is unlovely when luxuriant and in a lively
condition. It is only when diseased or uncared for that any color
appears disagreeable. Sandy hair, when well brushed and kept glossy
with the natural oil of the scalp, changes to a warm golden tinge. I
have seen a most obnoxious head of this color so changed by a few
years’ care that it became the admiration of the owner’s friends, and
could hardly be recognized as the withered, fiery locks once worn.
Superfluous hair is as troublesome to those who have it as baldness
is to others. There is no way to remove it but by dilute acids or
caustics, patiently applied time after time, as the hair makes
its appearance. The mildest depilatories known are parsley water,
acacia-juice, and the gum of ivy. It is said that nut-oil will prevent
the hair from growing. The juice of the milk-thistle, mixed with oil,
according to medical authority, prevents the hair from growing too low
on the forehead, or straggling on the nape of the neck. As Willis says,
Nature often slights this part of her masterpiece. Muriatic acid, very
slightly reduced, applied with a sable pencil, will destroy the hair;
and, to prevent its growing, the part may be often bathed with strong
camphor or clear ammonia. The latter will serve as a depilatory, but
causes great pain, and must be quickly washed off. The depilatories
sold in the shops are strong caustics, and leave the skin very hard
and unpleasant. Bathe the upper lip, or other feature afflicted with
superfluous hair, with ammonia or camphor, as strong as can be borne,
and the hair will die out in a few weeks. Moles, with long hairs in
them, should be touched with lunar caustic repeatedly. A large, dark
mole on a lady’s neck was reduced to an unnoticeable white spot, but
the nitrate of silver caused a sore for a week in place of the mole.
Care should be taken to brush the back hair upward from childhood, to
prevent the disfiguring growth of weak, loose hairs on the neck. Fine
clean wood-ashes, mixed with a little water to form a paste, makes a
tolerable depilatory for weak hair, without any pain. Strong pearlash
washes also kill out poor hair.
A clever scientific man suggested that the growth of hair might be
hastened by frequently applying electric currents to it, or bathing
it in electrical water. Similar experiments have been made on vital
tissues with remarkable success. But this theory must be left for
further development.
The eyelashes may be improved by delicately cutting off their forked
and gossamer points, and anointing with a salve of two drachms of
ointment of nitric oxide of mercury and one drachm of lard. Mix the
lard and ointment well, and anoint the edges of the eyelids night and
morning, washing after each time with warm milk and water. This, it
is said, will restore the lashes when lost by disease. The effect of
black lashes is to deepen the color of gray eyes. They may be darkened
for theatricals by taking the black of frankincense, resin, and mastic
burned together. This will not come off with perspiration.
CHAPTER III.
Elegance of Manner.--Grace of the Latin Races.--The Secret
of Grace.--Gliding Movement.--Calisthenics.--Erectness of
Figure.--Shoulder Braces.--How to acquire Sloping
Shoulders.--Care of the Feet.--The Art of Walking.--Picturesque
Carriage of Southern Women.
Was it not Madame de Genlis who described the education in manners
under the old régime of France? In her memoirs she speaks of hating
Paris, when she came from the provinces, for the ordeal she underwent
there to fit her for polite society. She was taught, what she fancied
she knew already, how to walk, and was placed in the stocks two or
three hours a day to teach her the right position of her feet in
standing. A corset and back-board were provided to form an erect habit.
Whether in her day or later ones, the elegancies of manner are not
cultivated without sincere pains. Nature, indeed, creates some models
of such refined proportions and such informing spirit that they fall
at once into the curves of grace; but these are meant for models, and
happily nothing forbids those of lesser merit to attempt the same
lesson. Are not some born masters of the piano, full-flown at once over
the first difficulties of music? But does this hinder any pupil from
six hours’ daily drill, if need be, to grasp the same difficulties?
The one end is to be attained, whether instantly or not; and in some
cases the most laborious is by all means the most delightful player.
Courage, then. The same thing is true of other efforts than those of
the key-board; and it is quite as certain that the woman who trains
herself to be graceful will be so, as that the clumsy young pedant at
the scales will, in time, rush victoriously through the “Shower of
Pearls,” the “Cascade of Roses,” or any other drawing-room favorite of
gelatinized octaves.
For the first comfort, it must be owned that American women have the
least natural grace of any nation in the world. English women are
usually well trained in a sort of martinet propriety of attitude which
suits their solid contours; but neither Anglo-Saxon race knows an
approach to those lengthened curves, those bends of every slender joint
and supple muscle, which fill the eye in looking at a woman of Latin
race. I watched a Spanish-American girl in the gallery of the United
States Senate one night, in order to seize, if possible, her charm of
gesture. She was rounded, yet fine in figure, and seemed to be, as I
can best phrase it, all muscle. No one could think of her bones as
having any more stiffness than the pliant sprays of an elm. She leaned
on the railing of the balcony, not straight forward as even the elegant
and delicate diplomatic English ladies did, but lengthwise, as if
reclining; and the bend of her supple wrist, with the black and gold
fan, was simply inimitable to an American woman. Those intransferable
curves bewitched the eye even to pain; but something was gained in that
five minutes’ study which I reduce to two points: Sideway movements
and attitudes please more than those either forward or backward. The
secret of grace is to teach every joint of the body to bend all that it
can.
Take the last point first, and you have all that you need to teach the
finest grace. To the dumb-bells, to the calisthenic exercises and work
as if you were qualifying yourself to be a contortionist at a circus.
Vitalize every fibre, as the hot-blooded Southerner is vitalized, and
the body will play into grace of itself.
The first thing is the hardest--to stand straight. Most people are
satisfied indeed to attain this point of physical and polite culture,
and never get beyond it. Erect stiffness is better than crookedness.
To be admirable, the figure must be perfectly flat in the shoulders.
No projecting shoulder-blades, no curves are allowed here, however
pleasing they may be elsewhere. A stout figure can hardly be unrefined
if it is flat behind. A pair of inelastic shoulder-braces must be
called into requisition; and these should be made of coutille,
or satin jean, two inches wide, and corded at the edge. Make them
barely long enough to reach the belt of the skirts worn, and button
on them. Set the shoulders perfectly flat against the wall, and find
the distance between their blades; fasten a broad strap the same
length--not more than two inches, very likely--by sewing it to the
straps behind even with the lower edge of the scapula. This is the
best, as well as the cheapest shoulder-brace to be found. If well
proportioned, and all the measure taken scant, it can not fail to draw
the shoulders into place. Excellent teachers of physical training
say that the will alone should be used to force one’s self to stand
straight. This is true of a person in perfect health. But round
shoulders often result from weakness or sedentary pursuits, against
whose influence it is useless to struggle; and I would not debar any
half-invalid from the luxury of the support given by a strict pair of
braces. They relieve the heart and lungs by throwing the weight of
the chest on the back, where it belongs, instead of crowding it down
on the breast. To correct the ugly rise of the shoulders which always
accompanies curvature, and sometimes exists without it, weights must be
used. Nothing is more unfeminine than the straight line of shoulder,
which properly belongs to a cuirassier or an athlete. Some mothers make
their young folks walk the floor with a pail of water in each hand,
to give their shoulders a graceful droop. A substitute may be worn in
one’s room while at work, in the shape of an outside brace of triple
gray linen, having two extra straps buckling round the tip of each
shoulder, one long end reaching the belt, with a wedge-shaped lead or
iron weight hooked on it. This is heroic practice, but effectual; and
its pains are amply compensated by lines of figure which are the surest
exponents of high breeding.
The position of the feet is not to be neglected in the lesson of
standing. The toes should be widely turned out, to balance well; and
if the foot is inclined to turn in, this may be remedied by having the
boot heels made higher on the inside. This will throw the foot into
a position to develop the arched instep. A crooked leg is a matter
for surgical treatment; and in these days of curative ingenuity, with
steel braces it will be but the work of a few months to bring the most
awkward limb into shape. Those who have seen the wonders wrought with
deformed children who have crooked limbs and bodies will consider it
a simple matter to bring a partial disfiguration under control. As to
the size of the feet, sensible people will never be persuaded that any
degree of pressure which can be borne without suffering is injurious.
Nature knows how to protect herself. A clever old shoe-dealer gave
as his experience that people who always wear tight shoes never have
corns. It is the alternation of tight and loose shoes that gives rise
to these torments.
The great-toe joint ought not to project beyond the line of the foot.
I know a zealous young girl who regularly screwed her bare foot up in
a linen bandage before going to bed, to keep it in shape. For painful
swelling of the feet in warm weather, no remedy is as effectual as an
ice-cold foot-bath for five minutes in the evening or when they are
most troublesome. This, however, must never be taken without first
wetting the head plentifully with ice-water, and keeping a cold bandage
on it all the while. It is good to soak the feet for fifteen minutes
in warm water at least twice a week. This keeps them elastic, and in
delicate, pliant condition.
An elegant carriage is the patent of nature’s nobility, and appears of
itself when the body is held into proper attitudes, and made properly
elastic by exercise. The great cause of all stiffness is want of
exertion--a general rustiness of all the limbs. To the slender child of
the South the climate supplies a degree of relaxation and suppleness
which dispenses with the need of action. The women of South American
colonies seldom walk for exercise, yet their movements are full of
grace. The stimulus of thorough circulation, so potent and softening,
can only be gained in our colder latitude by exertion. A lazy woman may
be picturesque in a room or in a carriage, but never on foot. Americans
have one-sided ideas of grace in walking. A woman as straight as a
dart, who moves without any perceptible movement of the hips or limbs,
is considered an excellent walker. But this unvarying rectitude is far
from the poetry of motion. Watch the slight _balancement_ of a graceful
French woman, and you will see an ease, a spontaneity, and variety of
motion which set the former by comparison in the light of a bodkin out
for a “constitutional.” A fine walk is an affair of proper balance.
A clever friend, who has spent more time in the study of women’s ways
and manners in different countries than one can think profitable, has
some unique views on the subject of their walking. He says the haughty
women of Old Spain carry their weight mainly on the hips, which
gives an indescribable stiffness of demeanor. Americans do the same,
throwing the weight a little more on the thigh, without bending the
knee. French women carry the weight on the calf of the leg, and the
knee bends very much at each step, while the body is carried with the
least _balancement_ of the shoulders, and the head, so far from being
held like a cockade, or the head of tongs, is easy. _La tête dégagée,
les épaules tombante_ is the rule for a good style. Try the difference
of contracting the muscles in the calf of the leg in walking, with the
knee bent sensibly at each step. The body involuntarily throws itself
back, and a lightness of motion is the result, which is impossible with
the usual swing of the leg from the hips in the stiff walk of Saxon
women. The same authority says that the far-famed serpentine glide of
the creole, which travelers admire and vainly try to describe, comes
from a peculiar movement of the hips. The weight of the figure is
thrown on the loins, and half of the body moves alternately at each
step, not in a wriggle, as it is caricatured at the North, but with
a soft turn of the shoulders corresponding, and a smoothness which
betrays the sensuous temperament and luxurious physique. Such is the
walk of the women of Venezuela, Bogota, and La Plata. Such a gait,
however, would hardly be accepted in the Champs Elysées as suggestive
of high refinement. The women of Alabama and Georgia have traits enough
of this walk to make them among the most graceful in the world, as far
as carriage goes. The creoles of the Gulf have this sinuous glide,
betraying a flexibility of limb which we can scarcely imagine. To gain
this pliancy, twisting movements of gymnastics are especially suitable.
Gyrations of each limb, the head and body, produce, in a few weeks’
practice, an enviable degree of elasticity, which gives the carriage
something more than the up and down, forward and back, straight lines
of motion with which ladies ordinarily favor us. A smooth, long step,
the weight of the body on the loins, where nature intended it should
be, and the legs propelled from thence, without stiffness at the knee
or obtrusive motion of the hips, is, probably, the ideal of walking;
such as one finds both in a highly trained woman and in the untaught
perfection of a South Sea Islander.
I have spoken at length on the topic of walking, because its importance
as an art of grace can not be overrated, and because it has a still
deeper bearing on women’s health. The training which secures an
elegant carriage is precisely that which counteracts the tendency
to a dozen fatal relaxations at different points of the frame, and
prevents their appearance. No one ought to say that walking brings
on the disorders which blanch and wither feminine life. The cause is
the fatal, inherited weakness of constitution, shown by either undue
redness or pallor, by indolence or excitability, which is a slow decay
from its first breath, and poisons the hopes and the loveliness of so
many women. These doomed beings must work out their own salvation,
and make themselves anew in the effort. The weaknesses would develop
whether they walked or not. The care should be to adjust exercise and
nourishment, stimulus and rest, in due proportion. But the weak woman
must have separate counsel, for she by no means comes under the head of
these unpremeditated consultations.
CHAPTER IV.
N. P. Willis as a Critic of Beauty.--The Perfume of the
Presence.--Charm of Good Circulation.--Chills are Incipient
Congestion.--Paper Clothing.--Luxuries of the Bath.--A Substitute
for Sea-Baths.--To Secure Fragrant Breath.--Delicate
Dentifrices.--Fine Cologne.--A List of Fragrance.
When Willis died, American society lost its great personal critic. No
other writer shows such insight into the subtile elements of women’s
beauty, or speaks so assuredly on points of mere outward attraction.
That gentle and gracious critic who blesses the order of Old Bachelors
dissects feminine manner with zest, but is not given to that mention
of ear-locks and finger-tips which made “People I have Met” such
a conserve of hints for the dressing-table. It is a pity such a
connoisseur of feminine graces could not have taken half a hundred
distinguished specimens into his training to show the world such women
as fill the ideal of a refined man of the world. Willis was susceptible
to beauty wherever he found it: a perfect ear on the head of a plain
country girl would not miss the glance of this artist, and he betrays
what single charms may rivet the regard of a man of taste a dozen times
in those glorious sketches we never hope to see excelled.
You remember one of his heroines was remarkable for the perfume
which exhaled from her person. We are not to suppose that this most
fascinating gift was due to Coudray’s sachets, or to hedyosima on her
hair. From repeated experience, verified by that of very discerning and
sensitive persons, it is affirmed that certain people of fine organism
and perfect health have a fragrance belonging to their presence like
scent to a flower. One of the most powerful feminine novelists of
the day said that she always knew when a favorite brother had been
in a room by the slight indefinable perfume that followed him. His
pillow breathed it, and his easy-chair, and it was perceived even by
comparative strangers. I have known persons innocent of using perfume,
whose fragrant presence was recognized by every one who came near them.
In all cases this was accompanied by a bodily condition of perfect
health and much magnetic attraction. This may be named the first in
that list of subtile personal properties which constitute the strongest
and most enduring of physical charms, and which are not discussed with
any proportion to their potency. We do not stop to ask what pleases us;
refinement attracts, sweetness detains us, and we are only too glad to
lie under the spell.
May a plain woman reach her hand for these gifts of pleasing? Surely.
They were meant to be nature’s compensation for the lack of chiseled
features and ruffled tresses. To reach this subtile refinement requires
such preparation as the virgins underwent for the court of Ahasuerus:
“Six months with oil of myrrh, and six months with sweet odors”--if not
in kind, yet in care.
The secret of lively spirits, even temper, and magnetic presence
can never be attained in the world without a perfect circulation of
the blood. It may be out of season to say that people often keep
themselves too cold; but lay the hint away till next October, when
the weather changes, and mark the facts. Our seasons are two thirds
cold or chilly; our habits are sedentary, which tends to reduce the
force of the system; as a people we are not of excitable temperament;
and yet stout men and hearty doctors, who go rushing through their
business all day, complain because women sit in overheated rooms, and
can not endure draughts in the halls. There is but one answer to this:
Nature is her own guide, and it is one of her laws that no creature
can be uncomfortable in any way without losing by it. If the tone of
the system is so low that a woman feels chilly in a room at seventy
degrees, put the heat at once up to eighty, or higher, till she feels
luxuriously warm. Chilliness is a symptom to be most dreaded. When the
blood forsakes the skin, it clogs the heart, the internal organs, and
lays the train for those diseases of the time--neuralgia, paralysis,
rheumatism, and congestion. In fact, every person who suffers from
one of these stupid chills is in a state of incipient congestion. How
hateful is the miserable economy which stints fires in the raw days of
May and September, because the calendar of household routine decrees
that it is not the season for stoves and grates! Not less irritating
is it to sit with a circle half shivering in a large parlor, because
the full-blooded, active master of the house has decided that it is
nonsense to turn the heat on. The slow tortures such unfeeling people
inflict on their innocent victims will be witnesses against them some
day, to their great surprise.
Even in summer many delicate persons find the skin always cold. Those
who are so susceptible should never be without protection. The most
convenient is a sheet of tissue paper quilted in marcelline silk, and
worn between the shoulders, the most sensitive point of the whole
body for feeling cold. The comfort of this slight device can hardly
be imagined. Paper is a non-conductor of heat, but porous enough to
admit air, so that it never leaves the dampness of rubber or oil-silk
protectors. Even in winter the warmth of these slender linings exceeds
that of a sheet of wadding. In the change of the year, when it is not
cold enough for flannel, and one can not be comfortable without some
extra clothing, this is just what is wanted. A sheet of quilted paper
should be worn for the back, and one for the chest, the arms cased in
the legs cut from old silk or thread stockings, which cling to the
flesh, and keep it from the air better than any other article. Thus
equipped, a delicate woman may face the subtle chills of spring and
autumn without a shiver. Added warmth is not necessary about the trunk
of the body till extreme cold weather. Clothes fit closely there,
and the vital centres always generate most heat, so that only the
extremities and the upper part of the chest need protection.
The daily bath needs to be administered with some care. The value of
hot bathing is hardly understood. In congested circulation nothing
is so effective as a ten minutes’ bath at eighty-five degrees, the
water covering the body entirely, followed by a cold sponge-bath,
quickly given, and immediate drying. Bath-towels are not half large
enough as commonly made. They should be small sheets in size, like the
real Turkish bath-towels used by the women of Constantinople, which
envelop the body, and dry it at once. A bath should never chill one,
and the feelings may be safely trusted as guides in the matter. To a
constitution strong enough to meet it, even though somewhat depressed
at the time, nothing is so inviting as the stimulus of the cold bath,
the instant’s chill followed by the rush of warm blood all over the
body. For weak systems an invigorant is found, so simple and effective
that the wonder is why it was not used long ago. When the season or
circumstances forbid a stay on the sea-coast, a substitute nearly if
not quite as strengthening is found in an ammonia bath. A gill of
liquid ammonia in a pail of water makes an invigorating solution, whose
delightful effects can only be compared to a plunge in the surf. Weak
persons will find this a luxury and a tonic beyond compare. It cleanses
the skin, and stimulates it wonderfully. After such a bath the flesh
feels firm and cool like marble. More than this, the ammonia purifies
the body from all odor of perspiration. Those in whom the secretion is
unpleasant will find relief by using a spoonful of the tincture in a
basin of water, and washing the armpits well with it every morning. The
feet may be rid of odor in the same way.
But what shall destroy that foe to sentiment, that bane of all beauty,
an offensive breath? I can not imagine a woman could fall in love with
Hyperion if he had this drawback. The suggestion of unrefinement and
of physical disorder it gives would weigh against all the moral and
intellectual worth which might lie behind it. The antidote, happily,
is as simple as the evil is prevailing. With attention to the health,
and brushing the teeth at least night and morning, all besides that
is needed to secure a sweet breath is to dissolve a bit of licorice
the size of a cent in the mouth after using the tooth-brush. This
will even counteract the effects of indigestion, and does not convey
the unpleasant suggestion of cachous and spice, that they are used to
hide an offense. Licorice has no smell, but it sweetens the mouth and
stomach. A stick of it should be chipped for use, and kept in a box on
the toilette.
A tincture which restores soundness to the gums is one ounce of
coarsely powdered Peruvian bark steeped in half a pint of brandy for
a fortnight. Gargle the mouth night and morning with a teaspoonful of
this tincture, diluted with an equal quantity of rose-water.
For decaying teeth make a balsam of two scruples of myrrh in fine
powder, a scruple of juniper gum, and ten grains of rock alum, mixed
in honey, and apply often.
It is useful also to chew a bit of orris-root, which Browning says
Florentine ladies love to use in mass-time; or to wash the mouth with
the tincture of myrrh, or take a bit of myrrh the size of a hazel-nut
at night, or a piece of burned alum.
A very agreeable dentifrice is made from an ounce of myrrh in fine
powder and a little powdered green sage, mixed with two spoonfuls of
white honey. The teeth should be washed with it every night and morning.
To clean the teeth, rub them with the ashes of burned bread. It must be
thoroughly burned, not charred.
Spite of all that is said against it, charcoal holds the highest place
as a tooth-powder. It has the property, too, of opposing putrefaction,
and destroying vices of the gums. It is most conveniently used when
made into paste with honey.
A fine Cologne is prepared from one gallon of deodorized alcohol, or
spirit obtained from the Catawba grape, which is nearly if not quite
equal to the grape spirit which gives Farina Cologne its value. To this
is added one ounce of oil of lavender, one ounce of oil of orange,
two drachms of oil of cedrat, one drachm of oil of neroli or orange
flowers, one drachm of oil of rose, and one drachm of ambergris. Mix
well, and keep for three weeks in a cool place.
To this list of fragrance add a recipe for common Cologne to use as
a toilet water. It is oil of bergamot, lavender, and lemon, each one
drachm; oil of rose and jasmine, each ten drops; essence of ambergris,
ten drops; spirits of wine, one pint. Mix and keep well closed in a
cool place for two months, when it will be fit for use. Ladies will
be grateful for this who have known what trouble it is to find a
refreshing Cologne which does not smell like cooking extract with lemon
or vanilla. If with these hints a woman can not keep herself fragrant
and lovely in person, her case must need the help of the physician.
CHAPTER V.
Morals of Paint and Powder.--Antique Toilet Arts.--Washington
Ladies.--Making Up the Face.--Whitening the Arms.--Tints of
Rouge.--To Make French Rouge.--Milk of Roses.--Greuze Tints.--Coarse
Complexions Caused by Powder.--Color for the Lips.--Crystal and Gold
Hair Powder.--Dyeing Blonde Wigs.--To Darken the Hair.--Champagne and
Black-Walnut Bark.--Doom of the Complexion Artist.
The time has gone by when it was a matter of church discipline if a
woman painted her face or wore powder. Nor is it any serious reflection
on her moral character if she go abroad with her complexion made up
in the forenoon, however it may call her taste in question. All who
paint their faces and look forth at their windows are not visited with
hard names, else the parlor of every house on the side-streets of New
York might have its Jezebel waiting the dinner-hour and the return
of masculine admirers. George declares he could never own a wife who
used powder; and yet Annie comes down, looking innocent in her pink
bows, with a little white bloom on each temple, and a suspicious odor
of Lubin’s Violet floating round her. I don’t think George meditates
divorce on that account. There is something noble and ingenuous in the
sight of an uncovered skin; but we reconcile ourselves to the pearly
falsehood, accepting the situation with the false hair, not so gray as
it is in front, and the long, artificial-shaped nails, and the cramped
feet. Every body knows they are inventions, and accepts them as such,
like paste brilliants at a theatre.
The arts of the toilet are as old as Thebes. The painted eye of
desire, the burning cheek and dyed nails, were coeval with the
wisdom of Alexandria. Of old the Roman ladies used the fine dust of
calcined shells and the juices of plants to restore their freshness
of color. There is no end to the modern contrivances for the same
purpose. Crushed geranium leaves, and the petals of artificial roses
which contain carmine, friction with red flannel, and the juice of
strawberries, are homely substitutes for rouge. The women of the South
are more given to the use of cosmetics than their Northern sisters.
Perhaps Washington sets the example to all the states; for nowhere else
is seen such liberal use of paint and powder, skillfully applied, as
at the capital. There women paint for the breakfast-table, and carry
the deception every where. The Spanish-American ladies make the absurd
mistake of supposing their rich complexions and dark eyes are not more
enticing to Northern eyes than our own cold beauties; so, by the help
of toilet bottles, they present faces like Lady Washington geraniums
from nine in the morning till they ice themselves to frozen whiteness
for the evenings. Whited sepulchres is the phrase forever ringing in
one’s head at sight of this folly. What indignation has seized one at
sight of Madame ----, the witty and enviable, who had the weakness to
mask her lustrous, tropical, Murillo colors--which enchanted every
Northern heart--with poor plaster of burned oyster-shells! It was very
well for the Treasury blondes, who looked like human peaches till one
saw them close, to dabble in white and pink. It suited their style. For
these superb Creoles and Sevillians, never!
Both from principle and preference, this book discountenances paint and
powder. It believes that a woman needs no other cosmetics than fresh
air, exercise, and pure water, which, if freely used, will impart a
ruddier glow and more pearly tint to the face than all the rouge and
lily-white in Christendom.
But if she must resort to artificial beauty, let her be artistic about
it, and not lay on paint as one would furniture polish, to be rubbed
in with rags. The best and cheapest powder is refined chalk in little
pellets, each enough for an application. Powder is a protection and
comfort on long journeys or in the city dust. If the pores of the skin
must be filled, one would prefer clean dust, to begin with. A layer
of powder will prevent freckles and sun-burn when properly applied.
It cools feverish skins, and its use can be condoned when it modifies
the contrast between red arms and white evening dresses. In amateur
theatricals it is indispensable, the foot-lights throwing the worst
construction on even good complexions. In all these cases it is worth
while to know how to use it well. The skin should be as clean and cool
as possible, to begin. A pellet of chalk, without any poisonous bismuth
in it, should be wrapped in coarse linen and crushed in water, grinding
it well between the fingers. Then wash the face quickly with the
linen, and the wet powder oozes in its finest state through the cloth,
leaving a pure white deposit when dry. Press the face lightly with a
damp handkerchief to remove superfluous powder, wiping the brows and
nostrils free. This mode of using chalk is less easily detected than
when it is dusted on dry.
The best foundation for Lubin’s powder is gained by soaping the face
well, and taking care not to rinse off all the smooth, glossy feeling
it leaves. Dry the face without wiping, and the thinnest layer of oil
is left, which holds the dry powder, without that mealy look which
Lubin is apt to leave. To whiten the arms for theatricals, rub them
first with glycerine, not letting the skin absorb it all, and apply
chalk. The country practice is to substitute a tallow candle for the
glycerine; but ours is a progressive age. At least the moral feeling
leads one to spare an escort’s coat-sleeve.
Rouge needs consideration before rashly applying. There are more tints
of complexion than there are roses, and one can only be successful by
observing the natural colors of a beauty of her own type. Some cheeks
have a wine-like, purplish glow, others a transparent saffron tinge,
like yellowish-pink porcelain; others still have clear, pale carmine;
and the rarest of all, that suffused tint like apple blossoms. By
making her own rouge a lady can graduate her pallet--that is to say,
her cheeks--at pleasure. The following preparations have the virtue,
at least, of being harmless, which can not be said of most paints and
powders. Red-lead, bismuth, arsenic, and poisonous vegetable compounds
are used in the common cosmetics. Bismuth is most frequent; and its
least effect is to give the cheeks it has whitened a crop of purplish
pimples, which would indicate that the wearer was freely “dispoged” to
the same tastes as Sairey Gamp. The hideously coarse complexion of many
public singers is partly due to their use of bismuth powder. An old
dispensatory gives the following formula for a harmless cosmetic under
the name of Almond Bloom:
Take of Brazil dust, one ounce; water, three pints; boil, strain, and
add six drachms of isinglass, two of cochineal, three of borax, and an
ounce of alum; boil again, and strain through a fine cloth. Use as a
liquid cosmetic.
Devoux French rouge is thus prepared: Carmine, half a drachm; oil of
almonds, one drachm; French chalk, two ounces. Mix. This makes a dry
rouge.
The milk of roses is made by mixing four ounces of oil of almonds,
forty drops of oil of tartar, and half a pint of rose-water with
carmine to the proper shade. This is very soothing to the skin.
Different tinges may be given to the rouge by adding a few flakes of
indigo for the deep black-rose crimson, or mixing a little pale yellow
with less carmine for the soft Greuze tints. All preparations for
darkening the eyebrows, eyelashes, etc., must be put on with a small
hair-pencil. The “dirty-finger” effect is not good. A fine line of
black round the rim of the eyelid, when properly done, should not be
detected, and its effect in softening and enlarging the appearance of
the eyes is well known by all amateur players. A smeared, blotchy look
conveys an unpleasant idea of dissipation.
For the finger-tips, alkanet makes a good stain. An eighth of an ounce
of chippings tied in coarse muslin, and soaked for a week in diluted
alcohol, will give a tincture of lovely dye. The finger-tips should be
touched with jewelers’ cotton dipped in this mixture.
Hair-powder is made from powdered starch, sifted through muslin, and
scented with oil of roses in the proportion of twelve drops to the
pound. Crystal powder is glass dust, obtained from factories, or
powdered crystallized salts of different kinds. A golden powder may be
procured by coloring a saturated solution of alum bright yellow with
turmeric, then allowing it to crystallize, and reducing it to coarse
powder. This certainly has the merit of cheapness.
Color for the lips is nothing more than cold cream, with a larger
quantity of wax than usual melted in it, with a few drachms of carmine.
For vermilion tint use a strong infusion of alkanet instead of
poisonous red-lead. Keep the chippings for a week in the almond-oil of
which the cold cream is made, and afterward incorporate with wax and
spermaceti. Always tie alkanet in muslin when it is used for coloring
purposes.
When blonde wigs are not attainable for theatricals, a switch of dark
hair may be bleached by soaking in strong vinegar, and colored by an
infusion of turmeric in Champagne, or by the liquor obtained from the
tops of potatoes ready to flower, mixed with water, suffering it to
steep twenty-four hours. This is too poisonous ever to be used on the
head with safety.
The walnut stain for skin or hair is made precisely like that for
cloth, by boiling the bark--say an ounce to a pint of water--for an
hour, slowly, and adding a lump of alum the size of a thimble to set
the dye. Apply with a little brush, such as is used in water-colors, to
the lashes and eyebrows, or with a sponge to the hair. Wrap the head in
an old handkerchief when going to sleep, or the moisture of the hair
will stain the pillow-cases.
But one thing must be said: the woman who has once taken to painting
and coloring must go on painting and coloring; rarely, if ever, does
the complexion regain its bloom, the skin its smoothness, or the hair
its gloss. In most cases the operator must go on deepening the hue, and
in no case can he or she be sure of the shade or tint which successive
applications will produce.
CHAPTER VI.
Récamier’s Training.--Diana of Poitiers, Bath.--High Beauty of
Maturity.--The Worth of Beauty.--George Eliot on Complexions.--Dr.
Cazenave.--Barley Paste for the Face.--Prescriptions of the
Roman Ladies.--To Remove Pimples.--Cascarilla Wash.--Varnish for
Wrinkles.--Acetic Acid for Comedones.--To Remove Mask.--Lady Mary
Montagu.--Habit of Italian Ladies.--Wash of Vitriol.
The motto that used to haunt our souls over copy-books, “No excellence
without great labor,” is as true about personal improvement as any
thing else. Few celebrated beauties have gained their fame without
use of those arts which must be the earliest of all, since we have
no record of their first teaching--the arts of the toilette. Madame
Récamier, who exercised more power by her beauty than any woman of
modern times, was bred by a most careful mother, versed in all the
mysteries of training. Her exceeding delicacy of complexion arose from
the protection she gave it, never going out except in her carriage,
and scarcely knowing what it was to set foot to the ground. Margaret
of Anjou and Mary Stuart, in earlier times, were wise as serpents in
the magic of the toilet, disdaining neither May dew nor less simple
lotions for cheeks whereon the eye of the world was to dwell. Diana
of Poitiers bequeathed a legacy of value to her sex in commending the
use of the rain-water bath, which preserved her own beauty till, at
the age of sixty-five, no one could be insensible to her. Ninon de
l’Enclos left the same testimony. It is intolerable that women have not
the ambition to preserve their health and charms to the latest date,
and give up their cases so shamefully soon. An intelligent maturity
chisels and refines the face to a high and feeling beauty; that is to
the attractions of youth what the aristocratic head of Booth would
be beside a pink-and-white lady-killer of society. This serene and
finished expression should find physical favor to accompany it. Nor is
this to be gained, as many say, by leading a passive, emotionless life.
People of vivid feeling are the youngest. Their quick alterations of
mood make the face clean cut, yet do not settle it in uniform furrows.
Both grief and joy, yearning passion and utter renunciation, are needed
to sculpture finely the statues for remembrance. No one professing
the loftiest aims, who understands human nature, can despise the care
of personal beauty when, combined with moral worth, its influence is
so irresistible. Look at the portraits of those renowned as moral
and intellectual heroes; it will be found their greatness was rarely
associated with physical repulsiveness, and though their faces in the
conflicts of life grew seamed and worn, yet in youth they must have
been more than ordinarily remarked for beauty of a high order--Columbus
and Galileo and Whitefield will do for examples. And if the reader
go through the range of feminine celebrities, from the poets to
missionary biographies, “with portrait of the original,” not one face
in ten will dispute what I have said.
Least of all let any woman heed smiling scorn of her weakness in taking
pains to secure a good complexion--the real clearness and color, if
she eschew the coarse pretense of powder and paint. George Eliot,
with her masculine sense, bears witness to the irresistible tendency
to associate a pure soul with a lucent complexion. No woman can be
disagreeable if she have this saving claim; and there will be no
apology for adding a few estimable recipes for the purpose from the
collection of a foreign physician, Dr. Cazenave. He recommends the
following as a composition for the face:
Three ounces of ground barley, one ounce of honey, and the white of
one egg, mixed to a paste, and spread thickly on the cheeks, nose, and
forehead, before going to bed. This must remain all night, protecting
the face by a soft handkerchief, or bits of lawn laid over the parts
on which the paste is applied. Wash it off with warm water, wetting the
surface with a sponge, and letting it soften while dressing the hair
or finishing one’s bath. Repeat nightly till the skin grows perfectly
fine and soft, which should be in three weeks, after which it will be
enough to use it once a week. Always wash the face with warm water and
mild soap, rubbing on a little cold cream when exposing one’s self to
the weather. This paste was used by the Romans. With this, care _must_
be taken to bathe daily in warm water, using soap freely, toning the
system with a cold plunge afterward, if one can bear it.
For pimples use this recipe: thirty-six grains of bicarbonate of soda,
one drachm of glycerine, one ounce of spermaceti ointment. Rub on the
face; let it remain for a quarter of an hour, and wipe off all but a
slight film with a soft cloth.
The best wash for the complexion given is cascarilla powder, two
grains; muriate of ammonia, two grains; emulsion of almonds, eight
ounces: apply with fine linen. The frightful discoloration known as
_mask_ is removed by a wash made from thirty grains of the chlorate
of potash in eight ounces of rose-water. Wrinkles are less apparent
under a kind of varnish containing thirty-six grains of turpentine in
three drachms of alcohol, allowed to dry on the face. The black worms
called comedones call forth the simple specific of thirty-six grains
of subcarbonate of soda in eight ounces of distilled water, perfumed
with six drachms of essence of roses. But I prefer the advice of a
clever home physician, who lately told me that he removed comedones
from the faces of girls who applied to him for the purpose by touching
the head of each with a fine hair-pencil dipped in acetic acid--a nice
operation, as the acid must only touch the black spot, or it will
eat the skin. Remembering that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu quoted the
habit of Italian ladies to renew and refine their complexions by a
wash of vitriol, I begged to know how such a heroic application could
safely be made. The answer was that muriatic acid, sixty per cent.
strong, diluted in twelve parts of water, might be used as a wash, and
gradually eat away the coarse outer envelope of the skin, if any one
had fortitude to bear a slow cautery like this. Lady Mary records that
she had to shut herself up most of a week, and her face meantime was
blistered shockingly; but afterward the Italian ladies assured her that
her complexion was vastly improved. On the whole, the typhoid fever is
preferable as an agent for clearing the complexion, being perhaps less
dangerous and more effective.
CHAPTER VII.
Shining Pallor.--Lustrous Faces.--Golden Freckles.--Tiger-Lily
Spots.--Sun Photographs.--Nitre Removes Freckles.--Old English
Prescription.--For Yachting.--Almond-Oil.--Buttermilk as a
Cosmetic.--Rosemary and Glycerine.--Lotion for Prickly Heat.--For
Musquitoes.--Protecting Hair from Sea Air.--Fashionable
Gray Hair.--Dark Eyes and Silver Hair.--To Restore Dark
Hair.--Bandoline.--Cold Cream.--Almond Pomade.--For Skin
Diseases.--Sulphurous Acid.
The summer heats, which make nature lovely, are the bane of our
fair-skinned Northern girls. Southern frames receive the glowing
warmth, and grow paler and paler, because--giving a matter of fact
explanation of a beautiful appearance--the surface of the skin is
cooled by the perspiration, and the blood retreats to the central
veins. The “shining pallor” which poets love on the faces of their
favorite creations is the sign and effect of concentrated passion of
any kind in a quick, electric nature. I disbelieved in the expression
a long time, classing it with the “marble flush” and such freaks of
nature in novels; but the peculiar look has come under my eye more than
once. It is a very striking one, as if the light came from within--a
lustrous, elevated expression, too ethereal and of the spirit to be
merely high-bred. It is one of the refinements Nature gives to her
ideal pieces of humanity, and nothing coarse lurks in the creation of
the one who presents it. The Southern pallor is quite different--a
dead but clear olive, very admirable when the skin is fine. Northern
paleness is relieved rather than disfigured by a few golden freckles.
They are more piquant than otherwise; and girls with the pure
complexion which attends auburn, blonde, and brown hair ought to
consider them as caprices of nature to blend the hues of bright, warm
hair and snowy skin. When as large, and almost as dark as the patches
on the tiger-lily, every one will find them something to get rid of
with dispatch. Freckles indicate an excess of iron in the blood, the
sun acting on the particles in the skin as it does on indelible ink,
bringing out the color. A very simple way of removing them is said to
be as follows:
Take finely powdered nitre (saltpetre), and apply it to the freckles
by the finger moistened with water and dipped in the powder. When
perfectly done and judiciously repeated, it will remove them
effectually without trouble.
An old English prescription for the skin is to take half a pint of
blue skim-milk, slice into it as much cucumber as it will cover, and
let it stand an hour; then bathe the face and hands, washing them
off with fair water when the cucumber extract is dry. The latter is
said to stimulate the growth of hair where it is lacking, if well and
frequently rubbed in. It would be worth while to apply it to high
foreheads and bald crowns.
Rough skins, from exposure to the wind in riding, rowing, or yachting,
trouble many ladies, who will be glad to know that an application of
cold cream or glycerine at night, washed off with fine carbolic soap
in the morning, will render them presentable at the breakfast-table,
without looking like women who follow the hounds, blowzy and burned.
The simplest way to obviate the bad effects of too free sun and wind,
which are apt on occasion to revenge themselves for the neglect too
often shown them by the fair sex, is to rub the face, throat, and arms
well with cold cream or pure almond-oil _before_ going out. With this
precaution one may come home from a berry-party or a sail without a
trace of that ginger-bread effect too apt to follow those pleasures.
Cold cream made from almond-oil, with no lard or tallow about it,
will answer every end proposed by the use of buttermilk, a favorite
country prescription, but one which young ladies can hardly prefer as a
cosmetic on account of its odor.
A delicate and effective preparation for rough skins, eruptive
diseases, cuts, or ulcers is found in a mixture of one ounce of
glycerine, half an ounce of rosemary-water, and twenty drops of
carbolic acid. In those dreaded irritations of the skin occurring in
summer, such as hives or prickly heat, this wash gives soothing relief.
The carbolic acid neutralizes the poison of the blood, purifies and
disinfects the eruption, and heals it rapidly. A solution of this
acid, say fifty drops to an ounce of the glycerine, applied at night,
forms a protection from musquitoes. Though many people consider the
remedy equal to the disease, constant use very soon reconciles one
to the creosotic odor of the carbolic acid, especially if the pure
crystallized form is used, which is far less overpowering in its
fragrance than the common sort. Those who dislike it too much to use it
at night, will find the sting of the bites almost miraculously cured
and the blotches removed by touching them with the mixture in the
morning. This is penned with grateful recollection of its efficiency
after the bites of Jersey musquitoes a few nights ago. Babies and
children should be touched with it in reduced form, to relieve the
pain they feel from insect bites, but do not know how to express except
by worrying. Two or three drops of attar of roses in the preparation
disguises the smell so as to render it tolerable to human beings,
though not so to musquitoes.
Ladies who find that sea air turns their hair gray, or who are fearful
of such a result, should keep it carefully oiled with some vegetable
oil; not glycerine, as that combines with water too readily to protect
the locks. The recipe for cold cream made with more of the almond-oil,
so as to form a salve, is not a bad sea-dressing for the hair, and the
spermaceti and wax render it less greasy than ordinary preparations.
Animal pomades grow rancid, and make the head most unpleasant to touch
and smell.
Many preparations are given to restore the color to dark hair when it
is lost through ill health or over-study. The fashionables to-day,
with true taste, admire gray hair when in profusion, and deem it
distinguished when accompanied by dark eyes, to which the contrast
adds a piercing lustre. But those who consider themselves defrauded of
their natural tints may use this recipe: Tincture of acetate of iron,
one ounce; water, one pint; glycerine, half an ounce; sulphuret of
potassium, five grains. Mix well, and let the bottle remain uncovered
to pass out the foul smell arising from the potassium. Afterward add a
few drops of ambergris or attar of roses. Rub a little of this daily
into the hair, which it will restore to its original color, and benefit
the health of the scalp.
Ladies are annoyed by the tendency of their hair to come out of crimp
or curl while boating or horseback-riding. The only help is to apply
the following bandoline before putting the hair in papers or irons: A
quarter of an ounce of gum-tragacanth, one pint of rose-water, five
drops of glycerine; mix and let stand overnight. If the tragacanth is
not dissolved, let it be half a day longer; if too thick, add more
rose-water, and let it be for some hours. When it is a smooth solution,
nearly as thin as glycerine, it is fit to use. This is excellent for
making the hair curl. Moisten a lock of hair with it, not too wet, and
brush round a warm curling-iron, or put up in papillotes. If the curl
come out harsh and stiff, brush it round a cold iron or curling-stick
with a very little of the cosmetic for keeping stray hair in place,
or cold cream. To the recipe given in the last chapter another is
added, of perhaps finer proportions: Oil of sweet almonds, five parts;
spermaceti, three parts; white wax, half a part; attar of roses, three
to five drops. Melt together in a shallow dish, over hot water, strain
through a piece of muslin when melted, and as it begins to cool beat
it with a silver spoon till quite cold and of a snowy whiteness. It is
well to rub it smooth on a slab of marble or porcelain before putting
in glass boxes to keep. For the hair use seven parts of almond-oil to
the other proportions named. The secret of making fine cold cream lies
in stirring and beating it well all the time it is cooling.
Those who have the misfortune to contract cutaneous disorders arising
from exposure to the contact of the low and degraded--and charitable
persons sometimes run narrow risks of this kind--or from scorbutic
affections or the fumes of certain medicines, each and any of which
are liable to produce roughness and inflammation of the skin, will be
glad of a speedy and certain cure for their affliction. It is a wash
of sulphurous acid (not sulphuric), diluted in the proportion of three
parts of soft water to one of the acid, and used three or four times a
day till relieved. I knew a young lady whose fine complexion was ruined
by the fumes of medicine she administered to her grandmother, whom
she tended with religious care; and, thinking there may be others in
like case, hasten to give this prescription. _Sub rosa_--all parasites
on furniture, human beings, or pets are quickly destroyed by this
application.
CHAPTER VIII.
Service of Beauty.--Not for Vanity, but Perfection.--Eyebrows of
Petrarch’s Laura.--Fashionable Baths.--Trimming the
Eyelashes.--Luxury of the Toilet.--Its Magnetic Influence.--A Safe
Stimulant.--Amateurs of the Toilet.--Cosmetic Gloves.--To Refine the
Skin of the Shoulders and Arms.--Sulphate of Quinine for the
Hair.--For the Eyebrows and Eyelashes.--A Harmless Dye.--To Remove
Sallowness.--A Hint for Stout People.--Perfumed Bathing-powder.
It is a wonder that so few educated people address themselves to the
service of beauty in the human form. It is refined to study draperies
or design costumes for the adornment of the body, but not to develop
the perfection of the body itself. Hair-dressers, perfumers, and
tailors find ample consolation for being the ninth part of men, or
something less, in public estimation, since the world finds their work
a necessity, and amply repays it. Who make fortunes faster among the
working-classes than those who minister to the desire for beauty, let
us call it, rather than the severer name of vanity? The arts of the
toilet are advanced to the rank of a profession abroad. English fashion
journals declare this in their advertisements. Establishments in London
and at fashionable watering-places offer brightly furnished parlors
where one may enjoy the luxurious soothing of every appliance of the
toilet in succession. The warm bath, in all the appealing pleasure of
marble, porcelain, and gold, instead of dingy oil-cloths and reeking
zinc basins, gives place to the deft hands of the hair-bather and the
chiropodist, and these to the dresser, who arranges the locks, quickly
and artificially dried, in the most elegantly simple style. Then comes
the cosmetic artist, who removes blotches and specks from the face
with quick acids, laves it with soothing washes, or applies emollient
pastes which leave soft freshness behind. The vulgarity of paint and
enamel is not allowed in these establishments, though the operators
have good knowledge of all secrets of their art. Innoxious dyes are
used as novices never can apply them, superfluous hairs are removed,
and eyebrows and eyelashes are cared for by the most skillful hands.
The former have every unnecessary hair removed, and are thinned to
the penciled line they form in the portraits of Venetian ladies, who
secured this peculiar charm in the same way. If I could only find out
how Petrarch’s Laura trimmed her eyebrows, and give the method to my
readers!
With a pair of fairy-like scissors the lashes are trimmed a
hair-breadth, and brushed with sable pencils conveying an ointment
which increases their growth. The nails are polished, and the hands
indued with soft and perfumed oils which leave no trace. Picture the
luxury of such a place and such attention, instead of the frowzy rooms
and careless servants of a common hair-dressing saloon! The magnetic
benefit of such operations ought to count for much in elegant physical
culture. It unmistakably soothes the system, and freshens its powers
better than any narcotic stimulant. More than one of the most brilliant
writers of the time is in the habit of bathing and making a full
toilet before composition, feeling its magic influence on the mind in
rendering one’s thoughts bright and happy.
But blessed water and simples, chemicals and strokings, do their work
in stone-ware and top bedrooms as well as in baths lined with porcelain
behind the portière of a Pompadour dressing-room. Clever girls can do
much for each other in these matters; and let me hope no one will have
to ask more than sixteen people before finding a friend with nerve
enough to trim her eyelashes for her, as an ambitious maiden once did.
A fresh handful of prescriptions for these amateurs is taken from Paris
authorities.
Cosmetic gloves for which there is such demand are spread inside with
the following preparation: The yolks of two fresh eggs beaten with two
teaspoonfuls of the oil of sweet almonds, one ounce of rose-water, and
thirty-six drops of tincture of benzoin. Make a paste of this, and
either anoint the gloves with it, or spread it freely on the hands
and draw the gloves on afterward. Of course there is no virtue in
the gloves save as they protect the hands from drying or soiling the
bed-linen.
A paste for the skin of the shoulders and arms is made from the whites
of four eggs boiled in rose-water, with the addition of a grain or two
of alum, beaten till thick. Spread this on the skin and cover with old
linen. Wear it overnight, or all the afternoon before a party where one
desires to appear in full dress. This cosmetic gives great firmness
and purity to the skin, and may be used to advantage by persons having
soft, flabby flesh.
A wash to stimulate the growth of hair in case of baldness is made
from equal parts of the tincture of sulphate of quinine and aromatic
tincture.
For causing the eyebrows to grow when lost by fire, use the sulphate of
quinine--five grains in an ounce of alcohol.
For the eyelashes, five grains of the sulphate in an ounce of sweet
almond-oil is the best prescription; put on the roots of the lashes
with the finest sable pencil. This must be lightly applied, for it
irritates the eye to finger it.
The best dye is this French recipe, which is seen to be harmless at a
glance: Melt together, in a bowl set in boiling water, four ounces of
white wax in nine ounces of olive-oil, stirring in, when melted and
mixed, two ounces of burned cork in powder. This will not take the dull
bluish tinge of metallic dyes, but gives a lustrous blackness to the
hair like life. To apply it, put on old gloves, cover the shoulders
carefully to protect the dress, and spread the salvy preparation like
pomade on the head, brushing it well in and through the hair. It
changes the color instantly, as it is a black dressing rather than a
dye. A brown tint may be given by steeping an ounce of walnut bark,
tied in coarse close muslin, in the oil for a week before boiling. The
bark is to be had at any large drug-store, for about thirty cents an
ounce.
The recipes which follow will be of special value in the warm days of
early spring. The first contains nearly all the vegetable medicines
in common use for purifying the blood, and will prevent the lassitude
and bilious symptoms which overcloud many a sweet spring day. When
made by one’s own hand, so that the purity and excellence of the
ingredients can be insured, the mixture is far better than most of
the blood-purifiers and tonics prescribed by the faculty. It is given
here because it removes the sallowness and unhealthy iris hues of the
complexion at a season when a girl’s cheek should wear its brightest,
clearest flame.
Half an ounce each of spruce, hemlock, and sarsaparilla bark,
dandelion, burdock, and yellow dock, in one gallon of water; boil half
an hour, strain hot, and add ten drops of oil of spruce and sassafras
mixed. When cold, add half a pound of brown sugar and half a cup of
yeast. Let it stand twelve hours in a jar covered tight, and bottle.
Use this freely as an iced drink. This is a good recipe for the root
beer which New Yorkers like to taste during warm months.
People inclined to embonpoint feel the burden of mortality oppressive
during the first heats of the calendar. They will be glad to hear from
a hill-country doctor, whose praise is in many households, that a
strong decoction of sassafras drunk frequently will reduce the flesh as
rapidly as any remedy known. Take it either iced or hot, as fancied,
with sugar if preferred. It is not advisable, however, to take this
tea in certain states of health, and the family physician should be
consulted before taking it. A strong infusion is made at the rate of
an ounce of sassafras to a quart of water. Boil it half an hour very
slowly, and let it stand till cold, heating again if desired, and
keeping it from the air.
A trouble scarcely to be named among refined persons is profuse
perspiration, which ruins clothing and comfort alike. For this it is
recommended to bathe the feet, hands, and parts of the body where the
secretion is greatest with cold infusion of rosemary, sage, or thyme,
and afterward dust the stockings and under-garments with a mixture
of two and a half drachms of camphor, four ounces of orris-root, and
sixteen ounces of starch, the whole reduced to impalpable powder. Tie
it in a coarse muslin bag, and shake it over the clothes. This makes a
very fine bathing-powder.
CHAPTER IX.
Hope for Homely People.--Two Vital Charms.--The Way to Live.--Sunrise
and Open Air.--Bleached by the Dawn.--Live at Sunny Windows.--In
Balconies and Parks.--Christiana’s Breakfast.--Brown Steak and
Good-humor.--True Bread.--Device for Stiff Shoulders.--Corsets and
Girdles.--The Latter more Needed.--How to be Pleased with One’s Self.
Is there such a being as a hopelessly homely woman? In the light of
modern appliances, study the faces and figures one meets on a journey
from the sea-board to the interior, and confess that there are few
fatally ugly women. On the railway I often amuse myself, in default of
better things, by considering how hygiene, cosmetics, and good taste in
dress would transform the common-looking women about one into charming
and even striking personages. In most of them, all that is wanting is
strength of expression and a clear complexion, two things with which
no woman can be wholly unattractive. The one is the sign of mental,
the other of physical health. No wonder nature makes them so winning.
To show what I mean, let us mention some common faults, and their
antidotes. Nothing is more delightful than pulling our neighbors to
pieces, with a good motive for it.
Christiana is over thirty--no reason in the least why she should not
be as admired as a three days’ rose, for one of the most beautiful
women in New York, whom every one is infatuated with, is over sixty.
Yet nobody thinks of Christiana’s looks, for the simple reason that
she has given up thinking of them herself--believing her poor skin
can not be improved, nor the stiff, high carriage of her shoulders
be changed. The depth of her eyes and her really good color are lost
with these defects. To judge how the remedies should be applied,
scrutinize her entire mode of living. Sunrise, in January or June,
and she is not up! This will never serve a candidate for beauty. The
first rays of the sun, the purity of early air, have as potent an
effect on the complexion as the noon rays on the webs of linen in the
bleaching-ground. By all means, if one must rob daylight for sleep,
take the hours from ten to three, but see the fires in the east from
out-of-doors, even if your head touched the pillow only two hours
before. I don’t believe in any special morality in getting up early,
but I do know its benefits on nerves and circulation of the blood.
There is a tonic in the dew-cool air, a lingering of night’s romance,
that stirs while it soothes the blood like a fine magnetic hand.
But getting up and staying in the house won’t improve one’s complexion.
How much of her rose-and-lily face the English peasant woman owes
to her walk to the reaping-field at daybreak is well known. After
the first soft days of February and March there is nothing to hinder
Christiana from reading her prayer-book or morning paper on the porch
in the sunlight, if she choose to do this rather than rake the dead
leaves from the grass, sweep the steps, or do something to stir her
laggard blood. If it is cold, let her plant herself at the sunniest
window, sew, run her machine, lounge, and eat there, till she is no
more afraid of sunshine than of any other blood relation. Our women
want to imitate French sense, and sit in the balconies and parks to do
their work. When they lose the detestable vice of self-consciousness
that saps American well-being in all ways, they will be able to live at
their casements, sewing, singing, reading, as thoughtless and unnoticed
as the white doves soaring above them where the sunshine is widest. It
is matter of custom merely.
But Christiana’s breakfast is ready by this time, and we will see what
she eats. Coffee: well, housekeepers buy the ready-ground coffee now,
and it is mixed trash, wanting the heartiness of a good pure cup, but
no great harm at worst. Meat: do you call that bit the width of two
fingers, crisped, greased at one end, raw and bleeding at the other,
fit sustenance for a woman who is to grow, work, walk, dance, and
sing to-day? She is made to live neither on leather nor raw meat. Cook
a slice of thick beef-steak as quickly as possible till the color
is changed all the way through without drying any of the juice. The
albumen of the blood must be coagulated before meat is fit for human
stomachs, and proper cooking means something more than mere warming
through, and a great deal less than crisping. Now let at least a
quarter of a pound of this browned and fragrant sacrifice be cut for
this young woman--better if she eat half a pound--to be converted into
energetic work and Christian good-humor in the course of the day. One,
two, three, four slices of fried potato withered in fat! And this is
what some people call nourishment! Put on her plate two baked potatoes
of unimpeachable quality--poor potatoes are poison--and let each be
the size of her small fist. Where are the tomatoes, the celery, the
artichokes, salads, and sauces? She has tomatoes, three bits in a tiny
saucerette, as if it held some East Indian condiment. There ought to be
a saucer piled with them, or some savory vegetable delicately cooked;
for breakfast ought to be next to the heartiest meal of the day. It is
far the best way to take coffee and bread on rising, and eat the meal
later when one has worked into an appetite for it. Those who find it
impossible to alter their habits enough for this usually have duties
which ought to call them up long enough before to be quite hungry by
seven or eight o’clock, the usual hours in this country for breakfast.
Take away that thin slip of toast; it makes one turn invalid to see it.
What do you call this gray, broad-celled, pallid stuff? Bread--good
yeast bread? If there is any thing intolerable, it is what the makers
of it commonly call good home-made bread. It is mealy, or bitter, or
gray and coarse-grained, sad-looking, with white crust, as if the
owners were too poor to afford fire to bake it thoroughly. Give me
poor bread, and I can eat it in a spirit of resignation; but this
domestic hypocrisy of good bread libels the wheat that made it, and
arraigns the taste of those who eat it. Were it ever so good, there
is something better yet--the crisp, unbolted cake that lingers with
nutty richness on the palate, once tasting of which weans one from the
impoverished gentility of white bread forever. It is not urged on the
score of being wholesome. The phrase has been so much abused that the
cry of “healthful food” invariably suggests something which doesn’t
taste good. But the strength and richness and coloring of wheat-cake
recommend it to any breakfast fancier. There is no use aiming at
fine-grained complexions without the use of coarse bread at every meal.
A slice of Graham bread at breakfast will not counteract the evil
tendencies of incorrect diet the rest of the day. When you get your
coarse bread, two or three slices will not be too much at a meal. Such
ought to be the breakfast of a young lady who wishes to have roundness
of contour, unfailing spirits, and self-command, with ready strength
for walking, working, or study. Brain-work takes food as much as bodily
labor. Between Mrs. O’Flaherty in the laundry and the faithful lady
editor of a newspaper, it is probable that the former has the easiest
time of it, and uses less strength. The women worth any thing are built
and sustained by hearty feeding. It is so that singers and dancers
eat, and lecturers and authors--Grisi and Jenny Lind, Mrs. Kemble and
Ristori, Mrs. Edwards, the novelist, and with her nearly every writer
of note at this day. They are well-nourished women, whose appetites
would embarrass the candy-loving sylphs whose usefulness amounts to
nothing more than that of cheap porcelain. Women who exercise little,
of course eat little; in the end they can do nothing, because they are
not sufficiently fed. There is no grossness in eating largely if one
work well enough to consume the strength afforded. The best engines
are best fed. The grossness lies in eating and being idle. A woman who
limits her exertions to a walk around the squares daily may confine
herself to a slice of toast and a strip of meat. She will grow thin
and watery-looking, nervous and “high-strung,” to pay for it. To know
what charm there is in womanhood, go among the girls brought up in
villages along the coast. The well-poised shoulders that have a will
of their own, the round arms and necks, the profusion of hair, the
strength and nerve combined in their movements, give one the idea of
walking statuary. The poor drooping figures, the stiff shoulders we
complain of, come from one cause--lack of nutrition. Their muscles are
not strong enough to hold them erect, and their nerves are not fed
enough to stimulate the weak muscles to activity. How many times must
it be said over? Want of sunshine and nourishing food gives the coarse,
uninteresting look to most American women.
If Christiana would invoke mechanical aid to bring down her high
shoulders and put flexibility into her chest muscles, after thirty
years of abuse, it is easily done. Walking with a pail of water in
each hand is rather dull work unless there is a call for domestic
help. A homely but very effectual way of educating the muscles is to
wear weights fastened to the shoulders. A shawl-strap answers every
purpose, buckled on the shoulders with the handle between them on the
back, and fastening a flat-iron of five or six pounds’ weight to the
straps which hang under the arms. An extra buckle may be sewed half-way
down each strap, to fasten the iron on the end by a second loop. The
weights may be worn while reading or writing for hours, and will be
found rather agreeable to balance the stooping propensity by throwing
the stress on fresh muscles. With or without it, nine tenths of women
from eighteen years old upward will need another simple support to
relieve the muscles of the trunk below the waist. It matters little
what causes this feebleness, whether too hard work, the weight of
skirts, or degeneration of the muscular fibre from want of exercise and
lack of fresh air. Its relief is imperative to preserve bloom and life
of any kind worth calling life. If any girl or woman can not dance, run
up stairs, take long walks, or stand about the house-work, no matter
how slight the fatigue, support must be provided. Women wear corsets,
and say they can not exist without them, when the demand for aid of the
relaxed muscles of the hips and back, though far more imperative, is
neglected. The means are very simple: a bandage of linen toweling, soft
and cool, buckled, tied, or pinned, as tight as will be comfortable,
and so arranged as to relieve every muscle that feels fatigue. This is
worth all the manufactured appliances in the market, and its prompt use
averts a hundred distressing consequences. At the first approach of
debility these girdles should be worn, as they have been from ancient
times among Greek and Jewish women. It is not sure that their office
of prevention is not more essential than that of cure. Tight corsets
are an abomination, for they interfere with flexibility, and so with
that constant exercise of the trunk muscles which alone can keep them
in tone--keep them from degeneration and atrophy. As to the muscles of
the back and abdomen affected by the girdle, a degree of support just
sufficient to encourage them to their work, and prevent their giving it
up in fatigue and despair, will exercise and strengthen them. A bandage
tighter than is needed for this will do harm, not only by keeping the
muscles idle, and so weakening them, but by compressing the abdominal
viscera, and thus producing numerous evils.
There is a game children play called “wring the towel,” in which two
clasp hands and whirl their arms over their heads without losing hold,
that every woman ought to practice to keep her muscles flexible. Hardly
any exercise could be devised which would give play to so many muscles
at once. A woman ought to be as lithe from head to heel as a willow
wand, not for the sake of beauty only, but for the varied duties and
functions she must perform.
It would be an artistic feat to take Christiana through a course of
baths, diet, sun-sittings, and open-air walks, to show her to herself.
The oleander glow on firm cheeks, the eye of light, the tread of Diana,
the buoyancy of body that fosters buoyancy of mind and spirits, would
please her with herself.
How dexterously Nature inserts the reward of beauty before the
self-denials needed to gain health! A thoroughly healthy woman never is
unbeautiful. She is full of life, and vivacity shines in her face and
manner, while her magnetism attracts every creature who comes within
its influence.
CHAPTER X.
The Bonniest Kate in Christendom.--A Word to Mothers and
Aunts.--Different Vanities.--The Sorrows of Ugly Women.--Recipes of
an Ancient Beauty.--Sand Wash.--Color for the Nails.--Embrocation
for the Hands.--Soap to Bleach the Arms.--Freckle Lotions.--Artistic
Enthusiasm at the Toilet.
Was the last chapter too much of a sermon on Christiana’s breakfast?
You think so, Kate, who are longing to learn some art that may make
you the bonniest Kate in Christendom. You say your hands are rough and
unsightly, your hair grows where you do not want it, and is none too
thick where it ought to be. Your eyebrows are bushy--a most unfeminine
trait, that makes you look fierce as a lamb with mustaches. You don’t
seem lovely to yourself, and this consciousness makes you stiff and shy
in your manner. Somebody is to blame for this state of things. Either
your mother, or your aunt, or the lady principal of the school where
you studied, ought to have taken you in hand before you were fourteen,
and showed you the remedies for these defects that were to affect your
spirits and comfort in after-life. A girl should be taught to take care
of her skin and hair just as she is to hold her dress out of the dust,
and not to crumple her sash when she sits down. One thing will not
make her vain more than another. There are many vanities to be found
in women’s character. One is vain of knowing three languages, one of
her Sunday-school devotion, another of her pattern temper, and one of
her pretty face. Of all these errors, the last is most endurable. Every
attraction filched from a girl by neglect or design is so much stolen
from her dowry that never can be replaced.
Victor Hugo says that he who would know suffering should learn the
sorrows of women. Let him say of ugly women, and he will touch the
depth of bitterness. What tears the plain ones shed on silent pillows,
shrinking even from the pale, beautiful moonshine that contrasts so
fatally with their homeliness. They would give years of life to win
one of beauty. This regret is natural, irresistible, and not to be
forbidden. Better let the grief have its way till the busy period of
life takes a woman’s thoughts off herself, and she forgets to care
whether she is beautiful or not. Dam up the sluices of any sorrow, and
it deepens and grows wider. Is this treating a peculiarly feminine
regret over-tenderly? This is written in remembrance of a girl who
thought herself so homely that she absolutely prayed that she might
die and go to be perfect in heaven. More than one girl makes such a
wish this night before small mirrors in cottage or mansion chambers,
with no eye but her own to scan her hopeless features. Why doesn’t some
one open a school of fine arts, literally _des beaux-arts_, and make a
greater success than Worth, by improving wearers instead of costumes?
Till that time comes, let us make the best of present resources, and
consider these recipes, unearthed from an ancient book-shelf belonging
to a maiden lady who was once, if tradition may be credited, a beauty
of no mean order. There is one thing to console us, Kate: you and
I will never have to cry for our lost beauty. Your hands are to be
pitied, for soft, sensitive fingers are what a woman can least afford
to lose. They are needed to nurse sick folks, and do quick sewing, and
handle children with. So we are glad to learn something of this kind.
To soften the hands, fill a wash-basin half full of fine white sand and
soap-suds as hot as can be borne. Wash the hands in this five minutes
at a time, brushing and rubbing them in the sand. The best is flint
sand, or the white powdered quartz sold for filters. It may be used
repeatedly by pouring the water away after each washing, and adding
fresh to keep it from blowing about. Rinse in warm lather of fine soap,
and after drying rub them in dry bran or corn meal. Dust them, and
finish with rubbing cold cream well into the skin. This effectually
removes the roughness caused by house-work, and should be used every
day, first removing ink or vegetable stains with acid.
Always rub the spot with cold cream or oil after using acid on the
fingers. The cream supplies the place of the natural oil of the skin,
which the acid removes with the stain.
To give a fine color to the nails, the hands and fingers must be well
lathered and washed with scented soap; then the nails must be rubbed
with equal parts of cinnabar and emery, followed by oil of bitter
almonds. To take white specks from the nails, melt equal parts of pitch
and turpentine in a small cup; add to it vinegar and powdered sulphur.
Rub this on the nails, and the specks will soon disappear. Pitch and
myrrh melted together may be used with the same results.
An embrocation for whitening and softening the hands and arms, which
dates far back, possibly to King James’s times, is made from myrrh,
one ounce; honey, four ounces; yellow wax, two ounces; rose-water, six
ounces. Mix the whole in one well-blended mass for use, melting the
wax, rose-water, and honey together in a dish over boiling water, and
adding the myrrh while hot. Rub this thickly over the skin before going
to bed. It is good for chapped surfaces, and would make an excellent
mask for the face.
To improve the skin of the hands and arms, the following old English
recipe is given, the principle of which is now revived in different
cosmetic combinations. Take two ounces of fine hard soap--old Windsor
or almond soap--and dissolve it in two ounces of lemon juice. Add one
ounce of the oil of bitter almonds, and as much oil of tartar. Mix
the whole, and stir well till it is like soap, and use it to wash the
hands. This contains the most powerful agents which can safely be
applied to the skin, and it should not be used on scratches or chapped
hands. For the latter a delicate ointment is made from three ounces of
oil of sweet almonds, an ounce of spermaceti, and half an ounce of
rice flour. Melt these over a slow fire, keep stirring till cold, and
add a few drops of rose-oil. This makes a good color for the lips by
mixing a little alkanet powder with it, and may be used to tinge the
finger-tips. It is at least harmless.
Oil of almonds, spermaceti, white wax, and white sugar-candy, in equal
parts, melted together, form a good white salve for the lips and cheeks
in cold weather. A fine cold cream, much pleasanter to use than the
mixtures of lard and tallow commonly sold under that name, is thus made:
Melt together two ounces of oil of almonds and one drachm each of
white wax and spermaceti; while warm add two ounces of rose-water, and
orange-flower water half an ounce. Nothing better than this will be
found in the range of toilet salves.
A wash “for removing tan, freckles, blotches, and pimples,” as the
high-sounding preface assures us, is made from two gallons of strong
soap-suds, to which are added one pint of alcohol and a quarter of a
pound of rosemary. Apply with a linen rag. This is better when kept in
a close jar overnight.
Freckle lotion, for the cure of freckles, tan, or sunburned face and
hands--something which I would prefer to the rosemary wash before
given, is thus made: Take half a pound of clear ox gall, half a drachm
each of camphor and burned alum, one drachm of borax, two ounces of
rock-salt, and the same of rock-candy. This should be mixed and shaken
well several times a day for three weeks, until the gall becomes
transparent; then strain it very carefully through filtering-paper,
which may be had of the druggists. Apply to the face during the day,
and wash it off at night.
Now, Kate, do you see your way clear to the use and benefit of these
mixtures? All these articles are to be found at any large druggist’s,
or, if not, he will tell you where to find them. The rosemary and honey
may be found in that still fragrant store-room of your aunt’s, in the
country, unless she has taken to writing very poor serial articles,
and let the herb garden and the bees run out. To save trouble, take the
recipes and have them made up at once by the druggist, who understands
such things; but it is pleasant to dabble in washes and lotions one’s
self, like the Vicar of Wakefield’s young ladies. Then have you
patience to persevere in their use? For making one’s self beautiful
is a work of time and perseverance as much as being an artist, or a
student, or a Christian. I wish I were with you, and could keep you up
to your preparations, brush your eyebrows, trim your eyelashes, and
do the dozen different offices of sympathy and womanly kindness. I
should feel that I was the artist putting the touches on something more
valuable than any statue ever moulded. Can you feel so yourself? For if
you can once get hold of that artistic impulse, you have the secret of
all these toilet interferences.
CHAPTER XI.
A Dark Potion.--Olive-oil and Tar for the Face.--Olive-tar for
Inhalation.--Carbolic Lotion for Pimples.--Cure for Musquito
Bites.--Pale Blondes.--A French Marquise.--Deepening Colors by
Sunlight.--Seductive Cosmetics.--Nose-machine.--Finger Thimbles.
Neither distilled waters perfumed like May, nor embrocation smoother
than velvet, are this time to be offered you. The compound in its
ugliness is more like a witch’s potion, and the odor is generally
liked by those only who are used to it. But its merits are equal to
its ugliness--nay, so firmly am I persuaded of its effectiveness that
before sundown I doubt not its virtues will be in active test within
this household. Sea winds will roughen the face, and miscellaneous food
deteriorate the softest skins. There are wrinkles, too, showing their
first faint daring on the brow before the glass--wrinkles which had
no business there for ten years to come, at any rate. “What hand shall
soothe” their trace away?
It is a hunter’s prescription that comes in use. You will hear of it
along the Saranac, or up in the Franconia region, where the pines and
spruces yield fresh resins for its making. It is popular there for
its efficacy in keeping the black-flies and musquitoes away; yet even
hunters bear witness to its excellence in leaving the skin fair and
innocent. Thus runs the formula, simple enough, in all conscience,
yet how few will have the boldness to try it: Mix one spoonful of
the best _tar_ in a pint of pure olive or almond-oil, by heating the
two together in a tin cup set in boiling water. Stir till completely
mixed and smooth, putting in more oil if the compound is too thick to
run easily. Rub this on the face when going to bed, and lay patches
of soft old cloth on the cheeks and forehead to keep the tar from
rubbing off. The bed-linen must be protected by old sheets folded and
thrown over the pillows. The odor, when mixed with oil, is not strong
enough to be unpleasant--some people fancy its suggestion of aromatic
pine breath--and the black, unpleasant mask washes off easily with
warm water and soap. The skin comes out, after several applications,
soft, moist, and tinted like a baby’s. Certainly this wood ointment
is preferable to the household remedy for coarse skins of wetting in
buttermilk. Further, it effaces incipient wrinkles by softening and
refining the skin. The French have long used turpentine to efface
the marks of age, but the olive-tar is pleasanter. A pint of best
olive-oil costs about forty cents at the grocer’s; for the tar apply
to the druggist, who keeps it on hand for inhaling. A spoonful of the
mixture put in the water vase of a stove gives a faint pine odor to the
air of a room, which is very soothing to weak lungs. Physicians often
recommend it.
What is to be done with the malignant little red pimples that crop out
annoyingly at the close of warm weather? The cause is very plain.
When cool days check the perspiration, the system must send out matter
by some other outlet before it can adjust itself to the new state of
things. Nothing is better for the irritable face than bathing with a
dilution of carbolic acid--one teaspoonful of the common acid to a
pint of rose-water. The acid, as usually sold in solution, is about
one half the strength of really pure acid, which is very hard to find.
The recipe given above was furnished by a regular physician, and was
used on a baby, to soothe eruptions caused by heat, with the happiest
results. Care must be taken not to let the wash get into the eyes,
as it certainly will smart, though it may not be strong enough to do
further harm. No more purifying, healing lotion is known to medical
skill, and its work is speedy. Poor baby was not beautiful with his
face of unaccustomed spots and blotches, when the laving with the fluid
began at night, but next morning they were hardly visible. I commend
this again to mothers as a specific against those irritations with
which children suffer. For soothing musquito bites alone it is worth
all the camphor, soda washes, and hartshorn that ever were tried.
There is a word of comfort to-day for those most hopeless cases of
unloveliness, tow-colored blondes. Light hair of the faintest shade,
without a tinge of gold or auburn, is now fancied abroad. Chignons of
pale hair, dressed in abundant frizzes, command nearly as high a price
as those pure _blondes dorées_ which have been worth so many times
their weight in gold. Ladies of fashion in France dye their hair, or
rather bleach it, to this colorless state; and the effect is very
piquant with dark eyes and complexion. At the fêtes in Paris recently
a marchioness of daring taste attracted general admiration by her pale
tresses, relieved by profuse black velvet trimmings. Indeed, the only
wear for _très blondes_ is black, even if it is only black alpaca,
with transparent ruches at the neck and wrists. Let such not fear to
expose themselves to the fiercest sun to gain a shade or two of color
in the face. If the fine-grained skin which accompanies such hair take
on a pale, even brown, so much the better for artistic effect. Dark
eyes will give brilliancy to the dullest face; and dark they must be,
if the harmless crayon can make them so by skillful shading about the
light lashes. If ever art is a boon, it is when called in to change the
sickly whiteness of too blonde brows and lashes. We can hardly expect
that girls will carry their zeal for coloring so far as to feed for
months on the meal from sorghum seed, which has the powerful effect
of deepening the tint of the entire flesh--a phenomenon as true as
strange; but we must hope that they will live and work in the rays
of that great beautifier, the sun, which brings out and perfects all
undeveloped tones in Nature’s painting. Pale eyes darken in exercise
out-of-doors, and pasty skins grow prismatic like mother-of-pearl,
in that wonderful way which fascinated Monsieur Taine when he beheld
the miraculous brows and shoulders of English ladies. The idea did
not seem to suggest itself to the critical Frenchman, but it will to
every woman, that these charms were not wholly due to Nature. It is
bewildering to read the announcements of toilet preparations under
seductive names--rosaline, blanc de perle, rose-leaf powder, magnolia,
velvetine, _eau romaine d’or_, and the rest. Think of the potent
chemistry which waits outside our windows untried! Among the list of
“eyebrow pencils,” “nail polishes,” and lip salves, a foreign paper
brings to notice one invention which might be of use--a nose-machine,
which, we are told, so directs the soft cartilage that an ill-formed
nose is quickly shaped to perfection. No surgeon will deny that this is
possible to a great degree. That it would be a boon nobody can doubt,
seeing how many unfortunates walk the world whose noses have every
appearance of having been sat upon, or made acquainted with the nether
millstone. Long thimbles reaching to the second joint for shaping
fingers are a new device, though something of the kind was used by
very particular beauties fifty years ago. The only thing women would
not do to increase their comeliness is to put themselves on the rack,
unless indeed it were to live healthily.
CHAPTER XII.
Removal of Superfluous Hair.--Effects of High Living.--Work of
Typhoid Fever.--Roman Tweezers.--Lola Montez’s Recipes.--Paste
of Wood-ashes.--Bleaching Arms with Chloride.--Cautions about
Depilatories.--Public Baths.--Improving Complexions by the Sulphur
Vapor-bath.--How Arabian Women Perfume Themselves.--Profuse Hair,
Sign of Nature’s Bounty.
A correspondent wishes to know what will remove superfluous hair,
adding that she is annoyed with such a growth of it on her face
that she is the remark of her friends. These unfortunate cases are
the result of morbid constitution, freaks of nature which are to be
combated as one would eradicate leprosy or scrofula. The extreme growth
of hair where it should not be comes from gross living, or is inherited
by young persons from those whose blood was made of too rich materials.
Living for two or three generations on overlarded meats, plenty of
pastry, salt meats, ham, and fish, with good old pickles from brine--in
short, what would be called high living among middle-class people--is
pretty sure to leave its marks on lip and brow. Sometimes typhoid
fever steps in and arrests the degeneration by a painful and searching
process, which, as it were, burns out the vile particles, and, if the
patient’s strength endure, leaves her almost with a new body. The
red, scaly skin peels off, and leaves a soft, fresh cuticle, pink as
a child’s; the dry hair comes out, and a fine, often curling suit
succeeds it, while moles and feminine mustaches disappear and leave no
sign. But this fortunate end is not secured to order, and there are
preferable ways of renewing the habit of body.
For immediate removal of the afflicting shadows which mar a feminine
face there are many methods. The Romans used tweezers, regularly as we
do nail-brushes, to pull out stray hairs; and Lola Montez speaks of
seeing victims of a modern day sitting for hours before the mirror
painfully pulling out the hairs on their faces. But this often makes
the matter worse; for if the hairs are broken off, and not pulled up
by the roots they are sure to grow coarser than before. Often one
hair pulled out sends two or three to grow in its place. A paste of
fine wood-ashes left to dry on the skin is said to eat off hairs, and
is probably as safe as any remedy. The authority on feminine matters
quoted above recommends very highly a plaster which pulls the hairs
out by the roots. Spread equal parts of galbanum and pitch plaster
on a piece of thin leather, and apply to the place desired; let it
remain three minutes, and pull off suddenly, when it brings the hairs
with it, and they are said not to grow again. This will probably bring
the tears into the eyes of any one who tries it; but the courage of
damsels desiring a smooth face is not to be damped by such trifles
as an instant’s pain. If the plaster were left on more than three
minutes, it would be apt to bring the skin with it in coming off. It
is better to use daily a paste of ashes or caustic soda, left on as
long as it can be borne, washing with vinegar to take out the alkali,
and rubbing on sweet-oil to soften the skin, which is left very hard by
these applications. Applied day after day, it would not fail to kill
the hair in a month, when it would dry and rub off. This may be used
on the arms, which might be whitened and cleared of hair together by
bathing them in a hot solution of chloride of lime as strong as that
used for bleaching cotton, say two table-spoonfuls to a quart of water.
Bathe the arms daily in this, as hot as can be borne, for not over
two minutes, washing afterward in vinegar and water, and rubbing with
almond or olive-oil. This should be done in a warm room before an open
window to avoid breathing the fumes of the chloride, which are both
unpleasant and noxious. Strong soft-soap left to dry on the arms would
in time eat away any hair. But the trouble is that these strong agents
eat away the skin almost as soon as they do the hair, and nice care
must be used to prevent dangerous results. If the blood should be in
bad order, though not suspected by any one, least of all by the person
interested, caustic of any sort might eat a hole in the flesh that
would fester, and be a long time healing. I saw a frightful sore that a
lady made on her neck, trying to remove a mole with lunar caustic, and
should advise every one to be careful how they run such painful risks.
It is not wise to endure pain heroically, thinking to have the matter
over and done with at once. Better try the applications many times,
leaving them to do their work gradually and surely.
To lay the foundation of true beauty, the system should be purified
within as well as without. Nothing is of so much value in this respect
as the vapor-bath. In all our large cities public establishments exist
for taking these baths, and their virtues are well appreciated by those
who once try them. At the largest bathing-houses in New York ladies
attend regularly for the sole object of improving their complexion.
Perhaps the most successful form administered is the sulphur
vapor-bath, which works wonders for neuralgia. It purifies and searches
the blood, and I have seen a patient who had lost one of the loveliest
complexions in the world, as she thought forever, come out of her bath
day after day visibly whitened at each trial. For ladies past youth
nothing restores such softness and child-like freshness to the cheek or
such suppleness to the figure. Of course these baths can only be taken
at places for the purpose, where chemical means are not wanting. I only
mention them to urge all ladies who have the chance of trying them not
to fail of doing so, both for pleasure and benefit.
The vapor-bath, pure and simple, has stood for some time among
household remedies for various ills, and is given by seating the
undressed patient on a straw or flag chair over a saucer in which is
a little lighted alcohol, and wrapping chair, patient, and all in
large blankets. After a few minutes the perspiration streams as if
he were in a caldron of steam, and may be kept up any length of time.
Fifteen minutes are enough. A tepid bath should follow, if one is not
chilled by it, and after that either a good sleep or exercise enough
to keep one in a glow. Impurities are discharged from the system in
this way which else might occasion fever. The hair, skin, and nails are
insensibly renewed and refined by it. There is not the least danger
of taking cold if the precautions are taken of rubbing dry, dressing
quickly and warmly, and keeping the blood at its proper heat by work
or fire--in short, by doing just those things which ought to be done
should one never go near a vapor-bath.
Arabian women have a similar method of perfuming their bodies by
sitting over coals on which are cast handfuls of myrrh and spices.
The heat opens the pores, which receive the fumes, till the skin is
impregnated with the odor, and the women come out smelling like a
censer of incense. Twice a week is often enough for the vapor-bath; as
for the fumigation, some creature doubtless will be wild enough to try
the experiment once, which will be sufficient for a lifetime. _If she
do_, she will be very glad to know that ammonia bathing will destroy
most traces of her adventurous caprice.
A profusion of hair, however, is a sign of nature’s liberality, and
this growth is found in connection with a strength and generosity of
constitution that is capable of the best things when duly refined.
South Americans, with their supple bodies overflowing with vitality,
have splendid tresses, and so have the Spaniards and Italians. Such
people are quick and lasting in the dance, own deep tuneful voices,
move with vigor and ease, and have a luxuriance of blood and spirits,
which is too precious to restrain or lose. Fasting, denial of pleasant
food and plenty of it, till one is worn to an anchorite, may do for
religious penance, but does not reach physical ends so well as moderate
and satisfying indulgence. If any poor girl think, from reading this
paper, that she ought to starve and waste herself by sweating because
she has a pair of mustaches and a coat of hair on her arms, she is
vastly mistaken. If she want to know what she may eat, let her study
Professor Blot’s cookery-book. Whatever is there she may eat, _as_ it
is there, assured that all the delightful French seasoning will not do
her blood half the injury of a season’s course of pies made after good
Yankee fashion--the crust half lard and half old butter, the filling
strong with spice or drenched with essence, as the case may be.
CHAPTER XIII.
Madame Celnart’s Works of the Toilet.--Literature of Beauty.--Cares
of the Toilet.--Arts of Coiffure and Lacing.--How to Hold a
Needle Gracefully.--Iris Powder for Tresses.--Arts of Italian
Women.--Depilatory used in Harems.--Spirit of Pyrêtre.--Herbs used
by Greek Women.--Mexican Pomade.--Dusky Perfumed Marbles.--Lost
Perfumes.--Sultanas’ Lotion.--Brilliant Paste for Neck and
Arms.--Baking Enamel.
If ever a woman deserved a seat in the French Academy for the value of
her literary labors to her kind, it was Madame Celnart.
The works of this lively author on manners, dress, cosmetics, and
kindred topics no less interesting to her sex, are found in eight
small octavos in their native French. The lady was an industrious
and brilliant writer on themes of the toilet, the household, and
deportment, on which Mrs. Farrar, author of _The Young Lady’s
Friend_, of our mothers’ time, and Mrs. Beeton, the editor of _The
Englishwoman’s Magazine_, in our day, have succeeded her with much
adornment but hardly equal scope. Madame Celnart talks--one can hardly
imagine her holding a pen--like a Parisian, with empressement, with
drollery, precision, and inimitable sprightliness. Her lectures sound
like those of a gentle old beauty, secure in the charm of her finished
manner against the loss of her earlier fascinations, telling the
secrets of her age to a younger generation, with half a smile at their
readiness to seize these arts, and seriously pointing out the most
graceful or the most modest way of doing things, with the concern of
one who is conscious that grace and prudence do not come to all her sex
by nature. Imagine the arch gentleness with which she opens her work on
the toilet in such easy, sparkling guise as this:
“_Je viens de feuilleter les arts de plaire, les livres de beauté, et
autres évangiles des courtisane_,” which may be freely translated,
“I come to speak of the arts of pleasing, the literature of beauty,
and other evangels of coquetry.” She has a well-bred curl of disdain
for “_une allure bourgeoise mesquine_;” but with the reverence of
a true Frenchwoman, whose creed is her mirror, she pronounces her
work “_consacré à la toilette, et la conversation de la beauté_.”
These duties she divides with serious precision into the “_soins
de la toilette_,” which include cosmetic arts, and “_l’art de se
coiffer, lacer, et chausser_.” It was indeed an art, in the time of
hundred-boned corsets without clasps, to lace one’s self, and in the
days of classic sandals to put on one’s shoes. She is as exact in all
her details as a school-mistress, though one fancies a covert smile
on her wise face as she rallies the young demoiselles who dreaded the
bath--because it was so cold? Oh no; but because their modesty could
not endure the baring of their person even to themselves. Such, she
gravely advises, may save their “_pudeur_” by bathing in a peignoir.
One inevitably recalls Lola Montez’s dedication of her famous _Book
of Beauty_, “To all men and women who are not afraid of themselves,”
on encountering these French demoiselles with their conventual
susceptibility.
The graceful preceptress goes on with directions for sitting, for
holding one’s needle, for dancing, and holding one’s petticoats out
of the mud. Nobody will allow that these hints are superfluous who
notices the varied awkwardness which women fall into who are habitually
thoughtless on these points. Some of these nice customs may have
been carried to our shores, possibly with Rochambeau’s French ladies
at Newport or Salem. I remember hearing one of the fine Newburyport
ladies, who answer to the description of gentlewomen still, maintain
earnestly that it was most graceful to “sew with a long point”--that
is, to push the needle nearly its whole length through at each stitch,
instead of pulling it out, so to speak, by the nose. And she was right,
as you can verify by the next sewing you take up.
In the time of Madame Celnart, fine ladies used to powder their hair
with the dust of Florentine iris, which gave their love-breathing
tresses the violet odor of spring. A pleasant idea; but their iris, our
orris-root, must have been a trifle fresher than comes to this country.
It makes us sure that the beauties of Titian’s and Guido’s times were
real women, to know that they steeped their tresses in bleaching
liquids and dyes, and spread their locks in the sun for hours to gain
the coveted golden tinge; and the hair of the Bella Donna herself might
have caught part of its enchantment from the sprinkling of violet
powder that lent its waves a soul. Those immortal beauties would have
canonized Lubin had he been alive with his pomades and perfumes in
their time. Celnart was a courageous advocate of cosmetics, or else
she was wise enough to put the worst first, for one of her earliest
recipes is this depilatory, which is not at all quoted by way of
recommendation. It is the Oriental Rusma, a depilatory used in harems:
Two ounces of quicklime, half an ounce of orpiment and red arsenic;
boil in one pint of alkaline lye, and try with a feather to see when
it is strong enough. Touch the parts to be rid of hair, and wash with
cold water. When we say that orpiment and realgar are deadly poisons,
and add Madame Celnart’s remark that the mixture is of “_une grande
causticité_,” often attacking the tissue of the skin, our readers will
quite agree with her that it is only to be used with “_la plus grande
circonspection_,” or, still better, not at all. The _Crème Parisienne
depilatoire_ is harmless, and is given for what it is worth: One eighth
of an ounce of rye starch, and the same of sulphate of baryta (or
heavy-spar), the juice of purslane, acacia, and milk-thistle, mixed
with oil.
The high-sounding Paste of Venus, devised by a Parisian cosmetic
artist, who shared the mythologic fancy which prevailed years ago, was
spread over the skin to soften and perfume it. Esther herself might
have used it, for its conjugation of spices would delight an Oriental.
It was made of fat, butter, honey, and aromatics--the more the better;
but as none of our belles wish to try the anointing bodily, I spare
them the list, and give instead the _Esprit de pyrêtre_. The pyrethrum,
or Spanish pellitory, is an herb highly valued by cosmetic artists, and
appears in several recipes of the French:
Powdered cinnamon, one drachm; coriander, nineteen scruples; vanilla,
the same; clove, eighteen grains; cochineal, mace, and saffron, the
same; simple spirit of pyrethrum, one litre (about seven eighths of
a quart). Let these ingredients digest for fifteen days, and add
orange-flower water, half an ounce; oil of anise, eighteen drops;
citron, ditto; oils of lavender and thyme, each nine drops; ambergris,
three grains. Mix the ambergris with the pyrêtre, and put the two
liquids together. Filter after two days. Use as a toilet water.
No wonder French cosmetics are so highly valued, when their composition
embraces such a variety of pleasing ingredients. Thyme, anise, and
saffron seem homely herbs for a woman’s use, but they assisted at
every toilet among the Greek women of old; and Rhodora wove the crocus
(meadow-saffron) with the rose, and fennel among her jasmines, without
a thought such as these things give us of sick-teas and home-made dyes.
Why should herbs of such excellent renown lose the poetry that belongs
to them? Mingled in variety with ambergris and orange flowers, they
give body to a perfume rich enough to have satisfied Cleopatra.
If this recipe is complicated, what will be said to the next,
compounded by South American women, and fashionable in Paris not so
very long after the time of Josephine, who may have patronized, or,
indeed, introduced this souvenir of creole coquetry. Madame Celnart
says of it, “Only the Tartuffes of coquetry could blame the Mexican
pomade,” whose proportions indicate that the formula came straight from
the perfumer’s hands, and is therefore correct. Any one who wishes to
try it can reduce the measure to suit herself:
Extract of cocoa, sixty-four ounces; oil of noisette, thirty-two
ounces; oil of ben, thirty-two ounces; oil of vanilla, two ounces;
white balsam of Peru, one drachm; benzoin flowers, half a drachm;
civet, ditto; neroli, one drachm; essence of rose, one drachm; oil
of clove flowers, one ounce; citron and bergamot waters, each half a
pint. Steep the vanilla in the cocoa butter eight days in a hot place;
dissolve the balsam in half a glass of alcohol, with the benzoin and
civet, and add the spirit of clove. Mix the essence of rose and neroli
in the oils of ben and noisette, and beat the whole forcibly together
in a large marble or china bowl.
Creole women spread this paste on their smooth skins, which the oil
of cocoa softens and moistens, while the delightful changing odor
is absorbed, till their forms are like living, dusky, but perfumed
marbles. These recipes are given not so much for imitation, or
to contribute to the lore of perfumers this side the water, as
curiosities of national arts and feminine vanity. Where in our country
would we find the ingredients of the celebrated _Eau de Stahl_, known
to the Parisian chemists forty years ago? Its compound was as follows:
Alcohol, nine litres; rose-water, three litres; the root of Spanish
pellitory, five ounces; gallingale root, three ounces; tormentil, three
ounces; balsam of Peru, three ounces; cinnamon, five drachms; rue, one
ounce; ratania, eight ounces. Powder the whole, and put in alcohol;
shake well, and leave to macerate six days. Pour off, and let it stand
twenty-four hours to clear, after which add essential oil of mint, one
and a half drachms; powdered cochineal, four drachms. Leave to infuse
anew three days; filter through filtering-paper, and decant. Use for a
tooth-wash, for washing the face, or for baths.
Peruvian powder was a standard dentifrice of the same date. It is made
of white sugar, half a drachm; cream of tartar, one drachm; magnesia,
ditto; cinnamon, six grains; mace, two grains; sulphate of quinine,
three grains; carmine, five grains. Powder and mix carefully, adding
four drops of the oils of rose and mint.
The following cosmetic, called the _Serkis du Sérail_, is said to be
a favorite lotion used by the Sultanas, for whom it is imported from
Achaia--though this sounds more like one of those pleasant fictions
which perfumers delight to invent concerning their oils and pomades
than any thing we are obliged to believe. This may be said in favor of
the assertion--it is such a mixture of starch and oils as no one but an
odalisque could endure to use. It is made of sweet-almond paste, ten
livres; rye and potato starch, each six livres; oil of jasmine, eight
ounces; the same of oil of orange flowers and of roses; black balsam of
Peru, six ounces; essence of rose and of cinnamon, each sixty grains.
Mix the powders and essences separately in earthen vessels, then add
the powder to the liquid little by little, bruise well together, and
strain through muslin.
An elegant preparation for whitening the face and neck is made of
terebinth of Mecca, three grains; oil of sweet almonds, four ounces;
spermaceti, two drachms; flour of zinc, one drachm; white wax, two
drachms; rose-water, six drachms. Mix in a water-bath, and melt
together. The harmless mineral white is fixed in the pomade, or what
we would call cold cream, and is applied with the greatest ease and
effect. It must be to some preparation of this subtle sort that the
lustrous whiteness of certain much-admired fashionable complexions is
due. It is a cheap enamel, without the supposed necessity of _baking_,
which, by the way, is such a blunder that I wonder people of sense
persist in speaking of it as if it could be a fact.
CHAPTER XIV.
The Last of the Rose.--Weighing in the Balances.--To Love and
to be Loved.--The Enigma of Love.--Its Power over the Lot of
Men.--Inspiration in the Looks.--The Land of Spring.--The
Duchess of Devonshire.--Women at and after Thirty.--Training of
Emotion.--Warming the Voice.--Crow’s-feet at the Opera.--Bohemian
Arsenic Waters.--Recipe from Madame Vestris.--Milk of
Roses.--Sweet-oils.--Opera-dancers’ Prescription for Restoring
Suppleness.
For any woman, maid or matron, past youth, who hears the leaves begin
to drop, and sees the roses curl in the warm summer of her life, this
chapter is written. It is well that with the decay of bloom and outward
charm there should be a lessening of feeling, an amiable indifference
to the homage that youth covets eagerly. The woman of--who dares fill
in the age?--the woman who finds the faint lines on her cheek and the
pallor creeping to her lip should have learned and tasted many things
in her life--so many that she can appraise the value of all, and resign
them contentedly, with a little sigh, not for what they were, but for
what they were not.
She should have loved, and, if possible, have won love in return,
though that is less matter. The wisdom, the blessedness, come through
loving, not through being loved.
It is well if she can accept the complement of her affection, and find
out of what mutable elements it is made: its fervor and forgetfulness;
its devotion, often eclipsed and as often surprising with its fresh
strength--weak where we trust it most, and standing proof where we
surely expect it to fail.
Such is the love of man. It is a riddle, whose learning has cost gray
hairs on tender temples, the roses from many cheeks.
It is the tradition that love makes or mars a woman’s life; but I
have yet to learn that it does not exert an equal though silent power
over the lot of men. Be that as it may, a woman in love is far more
beautiful than one out of it. And this is true if the love last to
threescore.
Let women, if they would remain charming, by all means keep their hold
on love, their faith in romance. The power of feeling gives vitality
and interest to faces long after their first flush has passed. Speaking
as matter of fact, this is the case, for emotion has a livelier power
than the sun has over the blood, and the miracle of love in making a
plain girl pretty is explained by the stimulating effects of happiness
on the circulation. If you would preserve inspiration in your looks,
beware how you repress emotion. Cultivate, not the signs of it, but
emotion itself, for the two things are very distinct. Suffer yourself
to be touched and swayed by noble music and passion. To do this, place
yourself often under the best influences within reach. There may be
pathos enough in the rendering of a poor little girl’s song at the
piano to stir tenderly chords of feeling that were growing dull for
want of use. The rose of morning, the perfume of spring, have rapt
many a middle-aged woman away to divine regions of fancy, from which
she came back with their dewy freshness and smell lingering about her.
Youth has its daylong reveries while its hands are at work. We older
ones need to reserve with jealous care our hours of solitude, in which
the springs fill up.
The faces of old beauties have no charm beyond that of feeling. Look at
the women who were reputed the belles of our large cities twenty years
ago. They may be well preserved; but in most cases they are mere masks
in discolored wax. The pearly teeth, the small Grecian features, the
soft, fine hair and regular eyes are left, but the brow has learned
neither to weep nor smile, the lips are composed, and might be mute
for all the expression that replaces their lost crimson. One could
adore the wasted beauty of the Duchess of Devonshire, “worn by the
agitations of a brilliant and romantic life,” for the sake of the
fire and kindness that lit even its death-pillow; and the Josephine
of Malmaison, with eyes always eloquent of tears, wins more devotion
than the empress at Saint Cloud, confessed the loveliest woman of
France. Let no woman fall into the mistake of preserving her beauty by
refraining from emotion, for all she can keep by such costly pains will
be the coffin-like shapeliness of flowers preserved in sand.
Laugh, weep, rejoice, or suffer as life provides. Only feel something
natural, worthy and vivid enough not to leave your face a blank.
There is a time between twenty-five and thirty-five when the struggle
of life, mean or lofty as it may be, oppresses women sorely. Fret
and care write crossing script on their faces, which grow yellow and
pinched till they despair of comeliness. This is when they are learning
to live. Ten years or so make the lesson easy, and it is one of the
thankfulest things in the world to see such faces going back to the
blossom and sunny sweetness of their spring. Many a woman is handsomer
at thirty-nine than she was at thirty. Nature responds wonderfully to
the reliefs afforded her. The only counsel is to let Nature go free. Do
not think, because trial has bent spirit and frame together, that they
should stay so a moment after the heavy hand is off. If you feel like
singing, sing, not humming low, but joyful and clear as the larks, that
would carol just as gayly at ninety, if larks lived so long, as the
first summer they left their nests. The worst of English and American
systems of manners is the constant repression they demand. It impairs
even the physical powers, so that in training a singer the first thing
great artists do is to teach her to feel, in order, as they say, to
“warm up” the voice and give it fullness. Women need to cultivate
pleasure and amusement far more after they are thirty than before it,
I mean romantic pleasures, such as come from exquisite colors and
sceneries in nature or their homes, from poetry and the loveliest
music. They are twice as impressible then as they are in youth, if
they know how to get hold of the right notes. They leave themselves to
fall out of tune, and forget to respond.
Yet, as a woman does not love to carry her thinned tresses and
crow’s-feet into the glare of the opera, or to talk poetry when
rheumatism twinges her middle finger, the craft of the toilet comes
in most gratefully. The freshness of the skin is prolonged by a
simple secret, the tepid bath in which bran is stirred, followed by
long friction, till the flesh fairly shines. This keeps the blood at
the surface, and has its effect in warding off wrinkles. Bohemian
countesses over thirty may go to arsenic springs, as they were wont to
do, for the benefit of their complexions; but the home bath-room is
more efficacious than even the minute doses of quicksilver with which
the ladies of George the First’s court used to poison themselves--a
primitive way of getting at the virtues of blue-pill.
The celebrated Madame Vestris slept with her face covered by a paste
which gave firmness to a loose skin and prevented wrinkles. It was a
recipe which the Spanish ladies are fond of using, which requires the
whites of four eggs boiled in rose-water, to which is added half an
ounce of alum, and as much oil of sweet almonds, the whole beaten to a
paste.
A favorite cosmetic of the time of Charles II. was the milk of roses,
said to give a fair and youthful appearance to faded cheeks. It was
made by boiling gum-benzoin in the spirits of wine till it formed
a rich tincture, fifteen drops of which in a glass of water made a
fragrant milk, in which the face and arms were bathed, leaving the
lotion to dry on. It obliterates wrinkles as far as any thing can
besides enamel.
To restore suppleness to the joints, the Oriental practice may be
revived of anointing the body with oil. The best sweet-oil or oil of
almonds is used for this purpose, slightly perfumed with attar of roses
or oil of violets. The joints of the knees, shoulders, and fingers are
to be oiled daily, and the ointment well rubbed into the skin, till it
leaves no gloss. The muscles of the back feel a sensible relief from
this treatment, especially when strained with work or with carrying
children. The anointing should follow the bath, when the two are taken
together. It is a pity this custom has ever fallen into disuse among
our people, who need it quite as much as the sensuous Orientals.
Opera-dancers in Europe use an ointment which is thus given by Lola
Montez: The fat of deer or stag, eight ounces; olive-oil, six ounces;
virgin wax, three ounces; white brandy, half a pint; musk, one grain;
rose-water, four ounces. The fat, oil, and wax are melted together,
and the rose-water stirred into the brandy, after which all are beaten
together. It is used to give suppleness to the limbs in dancing, and
relieves the stiffness ensuing on violent exercise. Ambergris would
suit modern taste better than musk in preparing this.
CHAPTER XV.
The Fearful Malady of which no one Dies.--_Esprit Odontalgique._--Gray
Pastilles.--Important to Smokers.--Mouth Perfumes.--Care of the
Breath.--Directions for Bathing.--Perfumes for the Bath.--Bazin’s
_Pâte_.--Quality of Soaps.--Bathing and Anointing the Feet.--Nicety
of Stockings.--Delicate Shoe Linings.--Feet of Pauline Bonaparte.
Among the recipes, more or less valuable, which come to light in old
collections, one for the toothache, by Boerhaave, is too useful to be
lost. Even beauties have the toothache sometimes, especially after
going home from the Academy of Music on a snowy night with a tulle
scarf folded about their heads, or after sitting with their backs to
the window in a half-warmed parlor during a ceremonious call. Use
before beauty, mademoiselles; and with no more excuse is proffered
the _Esprit Odontalgique_, which should be kept in the dressing-room,
ready for the slightest signs of that most terrible malady, from which
nobody dies.
Alcohol of thirty-three degrees, one ounce; camphor, four grains; opium
in powder, twenty grains; oil of cloves, eighty drops. The efficacy of
this lotion will be seen at a glance, and no other authority for its
use is needed than that of the learned and excellent physician who gave
it its name.
Very properly follow the gray pastilles for purifying the breath.
They do so, not by disguising it, but by reaching the root of the
difficulty, arresting decay in the teeth, and neutralizing acidity
of the stomach. The mixture is very simple: Chlorate of lime, seven
drachms; vanilla sugar, three drachms; gum-arabic, five drachms--to be
mixed with warm water to a stiff paste, rolled, and cut into lozenges.
Madame Celnart archly advises all good wives to let their spouses
know that these lozenges entirely remove the traces of tobacco in the
breath. As a good wife will hardly interfere with a favorite habit of
her husband who is fond of smoking, the least any gentleman can do is
to render his presence acceptable after the indulgence.
Another pastille, preferable on some accounts to the above, but owing
its value to the same principle, is made from chlorate of sodium,
twenty-four grains; powdered sugar, one ounce; gum-adraganth, twenty
grains; perfumer’s essential oil, two drachms. Powder the chlorate in
a glass mortar; put the powder in a cup, and pour in a little water;
let it settle, and pour off. Repeat the process three times with fresh
water, filtering what is poured off each time, and mix the gum and
sugar with it, adding the perfume last.
A gargle for the mouth which combines all the virtues of _Eau
Angelique_, and every other wash of heavenly name, is made of the
chlorate of lime in powder, three drachms; distilled water, two ounces.
Reduce the chlorate with a glass pestle in a glass mortar, add a
third of the water, stir, and pour off, as directed before, till all
is added. To this add two ounces of alcohol, in which is dissolved
four drops of the volatile oil of roses and four drops of perfumer’s
essential oil. Half a teaspoonful of the solution in a wine-glass of
water is to be used at a time as a tooth-wash and gargle for the mouth
and gums.
With the best intentions as to physical neatness, many persons are
unable to make the impression of their company wholly agreeable. They
may remember with advantage that rinsing the mouth with this fluid
six times a day is not too much pains in order to make themselves
acceptable to others. There is no surer passport to esteem than an
innocent, taintless person, which wins upon one before moral virtues
have time to make their way. If you think this truth is repeated too
often, study the impression made by the respectable people you meet for
the next month. The result will satisfy you that those who are as neat
as white cats are as one to fifteen of the careless, easily satisfied
sort.
Slight disorders of the system make themselves known by the sickly
odor of the perspiration, quite sensible to others, though the person
most interested is the last to become conscious of it. The least care,
even in cold weather, for those who would make their physical as sure
as their moral purity, is to bathe with hot water and soap twice a
week from head to foot. Carbolic toilet soap is the best for common
use, as it heals and removes all roughness and “breakings out” not
of the gravest sort. Ladies whose rough complexions were a continual
mortification have found them entirely cleared by the use of this soap.
The slight unpleasant odor of the acid present soon disappears after
washing, and it may be overcome by using a few spoonfuls of perfume in
the water.
An excellent preparation for bathing is Bacheville’s _Eau des
Odalisques_. The French recommend it highly for frictions, lotions, and
baths. It is made in quantity for free use after this recipe: Two pints
of alcohol, one of rose-water, half a drachm of Mexican cochineal,
four ounces of soluble cream of tartar, five drachms of liquid balsam
of Peru, five drachms of dry balsam of the same; vanilla, one drachm;
pellitory root, one and a half ounces; storax, one and a half ounces;
galanga, one ounce; root of galanga, one and a half ounces; dried
orange peel, two drachms; cinnamon, essence of mint, root of Bohemian
angelica, and dill seed, each one drachm. Infuse eight days, and
filter. For lotions, add one spoonful of this to six of water. It is
also useful for freshening the mouth, adding twenty-four drops of it to
four teaspoonfuls of tepid water. For diseased gums, double the dose,
and gargle with it several times a day.
The _Pâte Axérasive_ of Bazin, the celebrated perfumer, has the
distinction of being highly commended by the French Royal Academy of
Medicine. It is better for toilet use than soaps which contain so
much alkali. Take powder of bitter almonds, eight ounces; oil of the
same, twelve ounces; _savon vert_ of the perfumers, eight ounces;
spermaceti, four ounces; soap powder, four ounces; cinnabar, two
drachms; essence of rose, one drachm. Melt the soap and spermaceti with
the oil in a water-bath, add the powder, and mix the whole in a marble
mortar. It forms a kind of paste, which softens and whitens the skin
better than any soap known.
Make toilet waters and pastes of this kind in quantity, as they improve
with age. It costs about one fourth as much to prepare them as to
buy the same quantity at the perfumer’s, and one has the advantage
of a finer article. Do not use cheap soap for the toilet. Such is
almost always made of rancid or half-putrid fat, combined with strong
alkalies, which dry and crack the skin, sometimes causing dangerous
sores by the poisonous matter they introduce from vile grease. _Never_
allow such soap to touch the flesh of an infant. To do so is little
better than absolute cruelty. White soaps are the safest, as they are
only made of purified fat.
The feet should be washed every night and morning as regularly as the
hands. It preserves their strength and elasticity, and helps to keep
their shape. What person of refinement can take any pleasure in looking
at her own feet presenting the common appearance of distortion by shoes
_too tight in the wrong place_, and the dry, hardened skin of partial
neglect? One’s foot is as proper an object of pride and complacency
as a shapely hand. But where in a thousand would a sculptor find one
that was a pleasure to contemplate, like that of the Princess Pauline
Bonaparte, whose lovely foot was modeled in marble for the delight of
all the world who have seen it?
As nice care should be given to feet as to hands, beginning with a bath
of fifteen minutes in hot soap and water, followed by scraping with
an ivory knife, and rubbing with a ball of sand-stone, which will be
found most useful for a dozen toilet purposes. The nails may be left to
take care of themselves, with constant bathing and well-fitting shoes,
unless they have begun to grow into the flesh, when all to be done is
to scrape a groove lengthwise in each corner of the nail. The whole
foot should be anointed with purified olive-oil or oil of sweet almonds
after such a bath. A pair of stockings should be drawn on at night to
preserve the bedclothes from grease-spots. The oil will soak off the
old skin, and wear away the scaly tissue about the nails, while it
renders the soles as soft and pliant as those of a young child.
A daily change of stockings is as desirable for those who walk out as
a fresh handkerchief every morning--but how many people consider it
necessary? It may sound audacious to suggest that when laundry-work
is an item, a lady would show her ingrain refinement by washing her
own Balbriggan hose as truly as by stinting herself to two pair a
week on account of washer-women’s bills. As for the vulgarity of
wearing colored stockings “because they show dirt less,” it is to be
repudiated, save in the case of children, who are quite capable of
going through with a box of white stockings in a day, and looking none
the cleaner for it at the end. Our bootmakers are in fault about the
lining of shoes, which ought to be changeable when soiled. Soiled,
indeed! When are common shoes ever clean within? Our manufacturers are
the opposite of the French, whose workmen wear fresh linen aprons, and
wash their hands every hour, for fear of soiling the white kid linings
at which they sew. The time will come when we will find it as shocking
to our ideas to wear out a pair of boots without putting in new lining
as we think the habits of George the First’s time, when maids of honor
went without washing their faces for a week, and people wore out their
linen without the aid of a laundress. Cleanliness means health in every
case, and a plea must be offered for those neglected members, that only
find favor in our eyes by making themselves as diminutive as possible.
CHAPTER XVI.
“The Leaves are Full of Joy.”--Nobility of the Body.--Its
Possibilities.--Brain and Heart Dependent on it.--Physical Culture
Imperative in America.--Our Contempt of Health.--Easier to be
Magnificent than Clean.--Distilled Water for Every Use.--Substitute
for Stills.--Vapor and Sulphur Baths.--Bran Baths.--Oatmeal for the
Hands.--Frequency of Baths.--Remedies for Hepatic Spots.
How lusty and delicate the young leaves grow on their stems in their
nook of sunshine! What could be lovelier in its way than the three
geranium leaves starting from the mould in the window-box where the sun
strikes across the corner of the sill? They are so firmly poised, yet
glancing; each full of green juice that the sun turns to jewel-light,
with spots of darker tint where the feathered edges overlie--a subtle
piece of color wrought by sun and soil for no eye to see but by chance,
yet ecstatic in its delight, as if meant for the centre trefoil of an
altar window. So the sun does all his work. So leaves grow by myriads
in the garden and the forest. So the forces of nature bring forth every
thing perfect if left free to their impulses.
There is something like the leaves in our frames, that would grow
springy and strong, soft-colored and brilliant, upright and joyous, if
it were suffered to. It appeals for sunshine and gayety, for abundant
food and ease, for copious watering, tendance, and freedom. Give it
these, and the body, under present conditions, is as far beyond its
common dullness and weakness as it is below the saints in light; for
heavenly bodies can not be very different from ours unless they cease
to be bodies.
The mortal frame is noble enough as it is. No harp ever vibrates like
it with emotion and pleasure; no star shines so fair or so wise as the
face of man. God made it, and God loves it, which is the reason it wins
so closely upon us, and is so dear. There is no wisdom in despising
the body or its sensations. It is crudity to uphold that the mental
part of us should absorb all the rest. Brain and heart are dependent on
the body, and it was meant, not for the slave--as men seem never weary
of preaching--but for the interpreter and companion of both.
Honor is due the body, and thanks for its pleasures, which should
be enjoyed with intelligence and leisure. They are no more low or
debasing than mental pursuits may be when pursued to the exclusion
of all others. The sensualist is no more intolerable in the order of
nature than the pedant or pretender in literature, and does little
more harm in the long-run. The former ruins himself; the latter, by a
false philosophy, may lead thousands astray. Give the body its due--its
thirds with the mind and the soul. Neither is the better for having
more than its share.
The need of physical culture grows more and more urgent in this
country. Here most unlike races mix sullen and mercurial blood
together in the most variable of climates. They interchange habits as
well, though the only one peculiar to Americans as such is a tolerable
contempt for the conditions of health--a contempt inherited through
half a dozen generations. The climate is not in fault, but the people
are. It is much easier in this country to be magnificent than to be
clean. At any hotel there is enough of useless upholstery, as a matter
of course, but a bath is an extra, often not to be had on any terms.
This is the case even in the metropolis, where at least a better idea
of civilization ought to prevail. For the rest, there is not much to be
said for the intelligent culture of any family who have carpets before
their bath-room is fitted up.
When refinement has reached a step beyond faucets and water-pipes,
each house will have its distilling apparatus to provide the purest
water for drinking and bathing. Nobody will any more think of drinking
undistilled water than they do now of eating brown sugar when they can
get white. Her Majesty the Queen of England uses nothing but distilled
water for her toilet, and the luxury and softness of such a bath are
so great that no one used to its indulgence will consent to forego it.
A small still costs five dollars, and would provide all the water that
is needed for family use. It should be kept in action all the time, and
fill a close reservoir for bathing, while that for cooking and drinking
should be freshly distilled each day. A simple substitute for a still
is a tea-kettle, with a close cover and a gutta-percha or lead pipe
fastened to the spout, leading through a pail of cold water into a jar
for holding the distilled water. The steam from the boiling water goes
off through the tube, condenses under the cold water, and runs off pure
into the receiver. Where houses are heated by steam, I am told, they
may be amply provided with distilled water by adding a pipe to one of
the tubular heaters, that will carry steam into a cooler, from which
pure water may run day and night.
Besides the distilled-water baths in a complete household, there should
be facilities for the vapor-bath at any time. This is invaluable in
colds, rheumatism, congestions, and neuralgia. The readiest substitute
is the rush-bottomed chair and lighted saucer of alcohol described in
a former chapter. A sulphur bath requires a shallow pan of coals with
a tin water-pan above it, and an elevated seat over the whole. Sulphur
is thrown on the coals, which mingles with the steam, and enters the
system by the pores, which are opened by the vapor. The patient,
brazier, and chair must be enveloped with a water-proof covering in the
closest manner, leaving only the head exposed, so that no sulphurous
vapor can possibly be breathed, as that would be suffocation at once.
In regular bathing establishments the patient sits in a wooden box,
having a cover and a water-proof collar which fits tight about the
neck, leaving the head out. This box is filled with steam by a pipe,
and the vapor impregnated with sulphur from a spoonful burning in one
corner of the box, or from a generator outside with connecting tube. It
is difficult, if not impossible, to administer a sulphur bath without
proper and special appliances.
The bran bath, recommended before, is taken with a peck of common bran,
such as is used to stuff pincushions, stirred into a tub of warm water.
The rubbing of the scaly particles of the bran cleanses the skin, while
the gluten in it softens and strengthens the tissues. Oatmeal is even
better, as it contains a small amount of oil that is good for the skin.
For susceptible persons, the tepid bran bath is better than a cold
shower-bath. The friction of the loose bran calls the circulation to
the surface. In France the bran is tied in a bag for the bath, but this
gives only the benefit of the gluten, not that of the irritation.
The frequency of the bath should be determined, after it has been taken
for a week or two, by feeling. Take the refreshment as often as the
system desires it. The harm is done not so much by bathing often as by
staying in the water long at a time. A hot soap-suds bath once a week
is beneficial to persons with moist and oily skins. Bay-rum and camphor
may be used to advantage by such persons each time after washing the
face. The hot suds bath should be taken thrice a week by those who wish
to remove moth patches.
One of the best ways to make the hands soft and white is to wear at
night large mittens of cloth filled with wet bran or oatmeal, and tied
closely at the wrist. A lady who had the finest, softest hands in the
county confessed that she had a great deal of house-work to do, but
kept them white by wearing bran mittens every night.
Pastes and poultices for the face owe most of their efficacy to the
moisture, which dissolves the old coarse skin, and the protection
they afford from the air, which allows the new skin to form tender
and delicate. Oat meal paste is efficacious as any thing, though
less agreeable than the pastes made with white of egg, alum, and
rose-water. The alum astringes the flesh, making it firm, while the egg
keeps it sufficiently soft, and the rose-water perfumes the mixture.
What are called indiscriminately moth, mask, morphew, and, by
physicians, hepatic spots, are the sign of deep-seated disease of the
liver. Taraxacum, the extract of dandelion root, is the standing remedy
for this, and the usual prescription is a large pill four nights in
a week, sometimes for months. To this may be added the free use of
tomatoes, figs, mustard-seed, and all seedy fruits and vegetables, with
light broiled meats, and no bread but that of coarse flour. Pastry,
puddings of most sorts, and fried food of all kinds must be dispensed
with by persons having a tendency to this disease. It may take six
weeks, or even months, to make any visible impression on either the
health or the moth patches, but success will come at last. One third
of a teaspoonful of chlorate of soda in a wine-glass of water, taken
in three doses, before meals, will aid the recovery by neutralizing
morbid matters in the stomach. There is no sure cosmetic that will
reach the moth patches. Such treatment as described, such exercise as
is tempting in itself, and gay society, will restore one to conditions
of health in which the extinction of these blotches is certain.
CHAPTER XVII.
The Banting System.--A Quaint Author.--Trials of Corpulency.--Result
of Living on Sixpence a Day.--Indifference of Doctors.--A Wise
Surgeon.--Relation of Glucose to Obesity.--Diet for Stout People.--No
Starch, no Sugar.--Losing Flesh at the Rate of a Pound a
Week.--“Human Beans.”--Humors of Banting’s Tract.--His
Gratitude.--Honors to Dr. Harvey.--One Day with Dives, the Next with
Lazarus.--Bromide of Ammonia.
Request is often made for the details of Mr. Banting’s system of
reducing flesh. The popular idea of the writer, whose modest pamphlet
has linked his name with the system he observed, is very like the
caricature of the dry modern savant. The severe scientist who keeps his
child for years without fire or clothes to demonstrate the superiority
of human beings to cold, or who throws a new-born baby into a tub
of water to prove that the race can swim by nature, should not be
mentioned on the same page with the kindly enthusiast of the letter on
corpulency.
There is no evidence in its pages that the writer ever tried authorship
before. He was over sixty-six years old, when, in a burst of gratitude
for his relief from the burden of too much flesh, he took up his pen
to tell his fellow-creatures of help for those who suffer a like
infliction. The quaintness of his pages reminds one of Izaak Walton,
from his opening sentences, where he declares, “Of all the parasites
that affect humanity, I do not know of, nor can I imagine, any more
distressing than that of obesity”--an opinion with which all his
fellow-sufferers will agree. He is fond of terming his grievance a
parasite, and the name slips out with a frequency which is like the
echo of objurgations hurled at his infirmity. Being called to account
for it later, he meekly declares that the word is used wholly in a
figurative sense. His state might have justified a stronger epithet.
No parents on either side, to use his own phrase, ever showed a
tendency to corpulency, but between thirty and forty he found the
habit growing upon him. His physician advised violent exercise, and
he took to rowing. Finding his flesh increase, he consulted “high
orthodox authority (never any inferior adviser), tried sea air and
bathing, took gallons of physic and liquor potassæ, always by advice,
rode horseback, drank the waters of Leamington, Cheltenham, and
Harrowgate”--doses enough, we should think, to have disgusted him with
life forever--“lived on sixpence a day, and earned it, at least by hard
labor, and used vapor-baths and shampooing,” without any help for his
infirmity.
The rich gentleman found his position, the good things of this life,
his houses, horses, and friends, small enjoyment, save as they
lessened the increasing burden life heaped upon him. He was obedient
and intelligent in using every means of relief suggested, but his
doctors were of very small use to him. As he pathetically says, “When
a corpulent man eats, drinks, and sleeps well, has no pain and no
organic disease, the judgment of able men seems paralyzed.” His state
was pitiable, and there are too many companions in distress who answer
to the same picture. He could not tie his shoe, and often had to go
down stairs slowly backward, to save the jar of increased weight on his
ankles and knee-joints. Low living was prescribed, and he followed it
so heartily that he brought his system into a low, irritable state, and
broke out in boils and large carbuncles, for which he had to be treated
and “toned up” in a way that brought him into heavier condition than
ever.
He speaks feelingly, yet with simple dignity, of the trials which stout
people endure, being crowded in cars and stages, uncomfortable in warm
theatres and lecture-rooms, besides finding themselves the butt of
ridicule, or, at least, the object of remark. The last caused him for
many years to give up public pleasures. Many persons, as they read,
will have cause to reproach themselves, for those who are considerate
of every other species of human infirmity fail to recognize the real
suffering of those who carry a load of flesh. A sensitive person
encumbered with adipose feels keenly the glances, if not the smiles,
which follow his entrance into a public vehicle. It is a test of
delicacy for others to appear unconscious of his infirmity.
When Turkish baths came into fashion, Mr. Banting tried them, with the
result of six pounds’ loss after taking fifty baths, which was not
encouraging, though they have been of service in other like instances.
In August, 1862, his case stood thus: He was nearly sixty-six years
old, five feet five inches high, and weighed over two hundred pounds.
He went to no excess in eating or drinking, his diet being chiefly
bread, beer, milk, vegetables, and pastry. Flesh impeded his breathing,
his eye-sight failed, and he lost his hearing, yet most of the doctors
he went to for relief considered his trouble of no account, as one of
the accompaniments of age, like wrinkles and gray hairs. The faculty
are to blame for overlooking such a foe to human comfort.
Mr. William Harvey, Surgeon of the Royal Dispensary for Diseases of the
Ear, was the first person wise and considerate enough to prescribe a
remedy. He reasoned from M. Bernard’s accepted theory of the product of
glucose as well as bile from the liver. Glucose is allied to starch and
saccharine matter, and is produced in the liver by ingestion of sugar
and starch. The substance is always present in excess both in diabetes
and obesity, and it struck this eminent surgeon that the same dry diet
which drains the excess of glucose in the former disease might be of
service in the latter. Abstinence from food containing starch and sugar
reduces diabetes, and accordingly he prescribed it for his patient. He
was to leave off all bread, milk, butter, beer, sugar, and potatoes,
besides other root vegetables, as these contain the largest amount of
fat material.
Yet the diet allowed was liberal. Breakfast was four or five ounces of
beef, mutton, kidney, broiled fish, and any cold meat except veal and
pork; a large cup of tea without milk or sugar, a little biscuit--_i.
e._, crackers--or an ounce of dry toast.
Dinner: five or six ounces of any fish except salmon, herring, and
eels, which are too fat; any vegetables but potatoes, beets, parsnips,
carrots, or turnips, green vegetables being especially good; an ounce
of dry toast; the fruit of a pudding; any poultry or game; two or three
glasses of good claret, sherry, or Madeira, but no champagne, port, or
beer.
Tea: two or three ounces of fruit, a rusk or two, and a cup of tea
without milk or sugar. Supper, at nine: three or four ounces of meat
or fish, and a glass of claret. Before going to bed, if desired, a
nightcap of grog without sugar was allowed, or a glass of claret or
sherry.
This was comfortable compared to his former diet, which was bread and
milk for breakfast, or a pint of tea, with plenty of milk and sugar,
and buttered toast; dinner of meat, beer, bread, of which he ate a
great deal, and pastry, of which he was fond, with fruit tart and bread
and meat for supper. Yet on the liberal diet his flesh went down at the
rate of more than a pound a week for thirty-five weeks.
He explains his belief that certain food is as bad for elderly people
as beans are for horses, and thenceforth he calls the forbidden food
“human beans.” He suffers himself to make a little mirth over the
enemy that held him in durance so long. We can well believe he would
“scrupulously avoid those _beans_, such as milk, beer, sugar, and
potatoes,” after he had groaned a score of years from “that dreadful
tormenting parasite on health and comfort.” He sensibly writes his
opinion that “corpulence must naturally press with undue violence upon
the bodily viscera, driving one part on another, and stopping the
free action of all.” He calls Mr. Harvey’s system “the tram-road for
obesity,” and says, “The great charm and comfort of this system is that
its effects are palpable within one week of trial.”
He protests that he found not the slightest inconvenience in the
probational remedy, which reduced his girth twelve inches and his
weight thirty-eight pounds in thirty-five weeks. He could go up and
down stairs naturally, and perform every necessary office for himself
without the slightest trouble; his sight was restored, and his hearing
unimpaired. In token of his gratitude, he gave the doctor, besides his
fees, the sum of £50, to be distributed among the hospital patients. To
prove the reality of his dedication of his letter “to the public simply
and entirely from an earnest desire to benefit his fellow-creatures,”
the editions were distributed gratuitously in hopes of reaching his
fellow-sufferers from flesh. He was eager that they should find the
relief which to him was rapturous. It must have reached some cases, for
more than 58,000 copies had been issued at the date of this edition.
The author was urged to sell his work, even if the proceeds were
given to the poor; but with the sensitiveness of a man not used to
appear in public, he says, “On reflection, I feared my motives might be
mistaken.” In giving the credit of this system to Dr. Harvey, we are
sure of obeying the wishes of the author, who speaks of his benefactor
with extreme gratitude, and says, “He has since been told it is a
remedy as old as the hills, but the application is of recent date.” He
thinks any one who suffers from obesity may “prudently mount guard over
the enemy, if he is not a fool to himself.” He was so far delivered
from his malady as to indulge in the forbidden articles of food; but
says, “I have to keep careful watch, so that if I choose to spend a day
or two with Dives, I must not forget to devote the next to Lazarus.”
No medicine was given with this diet save a volatile alkali draught in
the morning during the first month. This was probably the bromide of
ammonia, which is of great use in reducing an over-amount of flesh.
CHAPTER XVIII.
A Letter.--Trials of a Plain Woman.--The Best Husband in the
World.--Burdock Wash for the Hair.--For Children’s Hair.--Oil of Mace
as a Stimulant.--To Restore Color to the Hair.--Sperm-oil a Powerful
Hair Restorer.--The Cheapest Hair-Dye.--Cure for Chilblains.--Loose
Shoes the Cause of Corns.--Pyroligneous Acid for Corns.--Turpentine
and Carbolic Acid for Soft Corns.
Among inquiries not seldom repeated is an urgent demand for a
prescription to keep the hair from coming out. The following letter
will be acceptable to many readers.
“I was emphatically one of the ‘ugly girls,’ being of a very large
figure, and inheriting thin hair; otherwise I suited myself well
enough. But oh! the agonies I have suffered through my personal
deficiencies. Now, with a happy home of my own and the best husband in
the world, I can smile at the old distress. Yet it was no less real,
and I can pity the ugly girls as nobody but one who has ‘been there’
can.
“My hair began coming out when I was just in my teens, and has
always been the trial of my life. I have been up and down the whole
scale of restoratives, with all manner of recipes volunteered by
sympathizing friends. Last fall, after returning from a two months’
stay near Saratoga, where I had undergone a severe course of treatment
for sundry physical ills, my hair came out frightfully, till I was
almost without any, and nothing seemed to check it. A relative, an
old lady, told me to use burdock-root tea. I tried it, and it worked
like a charm. My hair has never grown as it does now, and it has
absolutely ceased coming out--something that has not been the case
for fifteen years. Something of this may be due, as far as growth is
concerned, to a receipt given me by a friend a month or so ago. It
is a family receipt, and something of a family secret. The ladies of
the house, who use it, have magnificent hair, which they attribute to
this receipt. It is a queer conglomerate, as you see: One pound of
yellow-dock root, boiled in five pints of water till reduced to one
pint; strain, and add an ounce of pulverized borax, half an ounce of
coarse salt, three ounces of sweet-oil, a pint of New England rum, and
the juice of three large red onions, perfumed at pleasure--(a quarter
of an ounce of oil of lavender and ten grains of ambergris would be
efficacious in overcoming the powerful scent of the ingredients).
“My little girl has magnificent hair, but it troubles me by coming
out this winter. As she is only five years old, I have hesitated
about putting any thing on. I wish you would some time say if it is
best to doctor a child’s hair, or let nature take its course. I have
learned that to shampoo the head with cold water every morning is an
excellent thing, as is an occasional thorough washing with soap-suds,
not rinsing the soap out completely. I have sometimes checked the fall
of hair by such means. The burdock root was also used by steeping it
in boiling water till a strong tea was made and used as a wash two or
three times a day, then at longer intervals.”
In answer to the query in the excellent letter above, it may be said
that it is always well to cure where there is disease. Simple remedies
aid nature. A child’s hair is too valuable to lose. One teaspoonful
of ammonia to a pint of warm water makes a wash that may be used on a
child’s head daily with safety. It does not split the hair, as soap
will do if left to dry in.
One of the most powerful stimulants and restoratives for the hair is
the oil of mace. Those who want something to bring hair in again are
advised to try it in preference to cantharides, which it is said to
equal, if not to surpass, without the danger of the latter. A strong
tincture for the hair is made by adding half an ounce of the oil of
mace to a pint of deodorized alcohol. Pour a spoonful or two into a
saucer; dip a small, stiff brush into it, and brush the hair smartly,
rubbing the tincture well into the roots. On bald spots, if hair will
start at all, it may be stimulated by friction with a piece of flannel
till the skin looks red, and rubbing the tincture into the scalp. This
process must be repeated three times a day for weeks. When the hair
begins to grow, apply the tincture once a day till the growth is well
established, bathing the head in cold water every morning, and briskly
brushing it to bring the blood to the surface.
When the hair loses color, it may be restored by bathing the head in a
weak solution of ammonia, an even teaspoonful of carbonate of ammonia
to a quart of water, washing the head with a crash mitten, and brushing
the hair thoroughly while wet. Bathing the head in a strong solution
of rock-salt is said to restore gray hair in some cases. Pour boiling
water on rock-salt in the proportion of two heaping table-spoonfuls to
a quart of water, and let it stand till cold before using.
The old specific of bear’s grease for the hair is hardly found now,
and one can never be sure of getting the real article; but an equally
powerful application is discovered in pure sperm-oil, of the very
freshest, finest quality. This forms the basis of successful hair
restoratives, and will not fail of effect if used alone. It is,
however, procured in proper freshness only by special importation from
the north coast of Europe.
In the list of hair-dyes, one agent has long been overlooked which is
found in the humblest households. It is too common and humble, indeed,
to excite confidence at first; but it is said that the water in which
potatoes have been boiled with the skins on forms a speedy and harmless
dye for the hair and eyebrows. The parings of potatoes before cooking
may be boiled by themselves, and the water strained off for use. To
apply it, the shoulders should be covered with cloths to protect the
dress, and a fine comb dipped in the water drawn through the hair,
wetting it at each stroke, till the head is thoroughly soaked. Let
the hair dry thoroughly before putting it up. If the result is not
satisfactory the first time, repeat the wetting with a sponge, taking
care not to discolor the skin of the brow and neck. Exposing the hair
to the sun out-of-doors will darken and set this dye. No hesitation
need be felt about trying this, for potato-water is a safe article
used in the household pharmacopœia in a variety of ways. It relieves
chilblains if the feet are soaked in it while the water is hot, and is
said to ease rheumatic gout.
Inquiries have been made after a cure for corns. It is not always the
case that they come from wearing tight shoes. I have seen troublesome
ones produced by wearing a loose cloth shoe that rubbed the sides of
the foot. It is best always to wear a snugly fitting shoe of light,
soft leather, not so tight as to be painful, nor loose enough to allow
the foot to spread. The muscles are grateful for a certain amount of
compression, which helps them to do their work.
When corns are troublesome, make a shield of buckskin leather an inch
or two across, with a hole cut in the centre the size of the corn;
touch the exposed spot with pyroligneous acid, which will eat it away
in a few applications. Besides this, a strong mixture of carbolic
acid and glycerine is good--say one half as much acid as glycerine.
Of course, only a very small quantity will be needed, and it must be
kept out of the way, for it is a burning poison. In default of these,
turpentine may be used both for corns and bunions. A weaker solution of
carbolic acid will heal soft corns between the toes.
CHAPTER XIX.
A Talk about Complexions.--Delicate Lotion.--Cause of Rough
Faces.--Sun Painting and Bleaching.--Court Ladies Refusing to Wash
their Faces.--Experiments with Olive-tar.--Consumption and Clear
Faces.--Rev. W. H. H. Murray on Olive-tar.--Porcelain Women.--Drawing
Humors to the Surface.--What is to be Done for the Weak Women?
A Southern lady sends the following recipe for glycerine lotion, which
is refined and pleasant as well as useful. The pain of sunburned and
freckled skin, so troublesome to many of our fair readers, can be
relieved, and the shining morning face of youth restored, by this
application: Take one ounce of sweet almonds, or of pistachio-nuts,
half a pint of elder or rose-water, and one ounce of pure glycerine;
grate the nuts, put the powder in a little bag of linen, and squeeze it
for several minutes in the rose-water; then add glycerine and a little
perfume. It may be used by wetting the face with it two or three times
a day. This is a grateful application for a parched, rough skin. It
should be allowed to dry thoroughly, when, if it feel sticky or pasty,
it may be washed off with warm water.
The reason why so many young women have rough faces is, they wash their
faces every day but neglect to cleanse their bodies. The pores are
clogged by secretions, and morbid matters in the blood break out in
the only free spot, the face. The ladies of King George’s court were
perfectly logical when they refused to wash their faces lest it should
spoil their complexions. They seldom washed either bodies or linen, and
it was dangerous to give their festering blood an outlet by clearing a
place for it.
Full-blooded girls whose complexions give them trouble should not eat
fat meat save in the depth of winter, nor drink milk. They may take
these in after-years, if they grow thin and weak from hard work or the
nursing of children. Their systems can turn the grapes and pears they
ought to feed on, the fish, chicken, and lean meat, the nutty oatmeal
and wheat cakes (not mushes), into flesh enough to round their elbows,
and strength enough to make their walk like the figure of a dance. They
should try daily bathing, or rather scrubbing with soap and hot water,
followed by a cold dip, a process taking a matter of ten minutes a day,
at most, if they know the meaning of dispatch. Very likely they will
need a few bottles of Saratoga water or doses of salts to clear the
blood, adhering religiously to a Graham diet the while, or their last
state after the medicine will be worse than the first. After taking the
sulphur vapor-baths they must go out-of-doors, and finish bleaching
themselves in the sun. By living in it five hours a day, they may gain
the lovely painted marble of the English girl’s face, who reaps all day
in the harvest field.
Cosmetics sometimes play tricks with fair skins which are quite
mysterious to the unlucky subject. This is the case with the tar
and olive ointment named a few chapters ago. Those who find that its
application brings out a fearful crop of pimples, and turns the skin
yellow, should feel that the ointment has been a friend to them, in
detecting a state of the blood that is any thing but safe. People of
sedentary habits, who pay little attention to their health, are not
aware how vitiated their blood may be for want of sunshine, good food,
and exercise. Its torpid current leaves no mark of disease on the
surface; humors concentrate in the vital organs, and finally appear in
the form of chronic disorders. Consumption leaves the skin clear and
brilliant, because the morbid matters which usually pass off through
the skin are eating away the life in ulcers beneath. The tar brings
them to the surface, and one application sometimes leaves a face in a
sorry state. Three ladies of different families tried the recipe at the
same time, with frightful results, for the reason that they were all
in the state when a dose of blood purifier would have had the same
effect. One lady kept on using the lotion, and her face became smooth
after trying it three or four times. When people perspire freely, such
unhappy effects are seldom noticed. Apropos of this, come a few lines
from W. H. H. Murray, the author of the _Hand-book of the Adirondacks_.
A lady who was puzzled by the effect of the cosmetic wrote to him about
it, knowing he was familiar with its use in the mountains, and received
this merry answer:
“I have had a hearty laugh over your perplexity. All I know is, the
mixture was common sailors’ tar and sweet-oil, with the consistency of
sirup. Our party, ladies and gentlemen both, have used it freely for
years in the woods, and the ladies have always declared that it made
their skin as soft as satin. Certain it is, it never caused any _rash_
in their case.”
Delicate, fair-skinned women are the very ones on whom this cosmetic
will have the effect of drawing humors to the surface. Heavens! how
many of this sort there are in the world--pale, shadowy as porcelain,
fragile of bone and tender of skin, about as useful as wish-bones of
a Christmas chicken! They have intense souls; it is a pity they have
not enough body to hold them. Is there not wit enough in the world to
conjure flesh to the bones and strength to the muscles of this great
army of weak women?
CHAPTER XX.
Sulphur Baths.--Bleaching Old Faces.--Experiments in
Bathing.--Cautions.--Need of Public Baths.--Their Proper
Prices.--Method of Giving Sulphur Vapor-baths.--Hot Baths for
Hot Weather.--Russian Baths at Home.--Improvements Needed in
Public Baths.--What they Should be.--What they Are.--The Russian
Vapor-bath.---After-Sensations.--Brightness and Lightness of
Health.--Reverence for the Physical.--Influence of Bathing on the
Nerves and Passions.--Necessity of Public Baths.
It is not a little amusing to receive requests for a way to give
sulphur vapor-baths to the face alone. Somebody wants a fair
complexion, and fancies it may be gained by bleaching the face like
an old Leghorn bonnet in a barrel. Aside from the certainty of being
choked to death by this method, there is no way of whitening and
refining the face by applications to it alone, when the conditions
of health are not regarded in other things. Carbolic acid may heal
pimples, and glycerine masks soften the skin; but lovely red and white,
with lips like currants, and skin like the flesh of young cranberries,
can not be had unless the blood is pure. For this it is indispensable
that food should be regulated, plenty of exercise and sunshine taken,
and all the bodily functions kept in the best order.
The woman who thought she could take the sulphur vapor-bath at home in
her own bath-room finds that her experience reads like a chapter from
the Danbury _News_ man. A bouquet of burning matches would furnish
the perfume inhaled in the process, and the vapor reaching her face,
left it pale and brown in spots, as if she had moth patches. That she
escaped with hair only partially tinged, and any eyebrows to speak of,
is due to Nature’s guardian care, which prompted the struggle for life
half a minute sooner than pride was inclined to give up. The fumes
lingering about the premises have induced the gravest suspicions on
the part of her neighbors. She is inclined to think that, if her face
would only turn brown again all over, she would forego her dreams of
Parian brow and cheeks like peaches.
A sulphur vapor-bath is a matter of caution, when given by the best of
hands. It is not well to take it in the damp, “breaking-up” weather of
March, for the bath opens the pores, and catching cold with several
grains of sulphur in one’s body is the next thing to salivation by
mercury. The consequence is that one feels heavy and aching, the eyes
grow weak, and teeth grumble, while latent rheumatic pains wake up
to sharp reminder of one’s imprudence. When the weather is warm and
settled, these baths are a luxury and medicine combined. They are most
effectual purifiers of the system, searching out and removing all waste
particles, to leave the skin as new and fair as a baby’s. I have seen
old and darkened complexions restored by them in a way that was little
short of miraculous. These baths are also of benefit in neuralgia, and
deal powerfully with scrofulous affections.
The time is not far distant when every town that owns a public hall
will also have its public baths. Before that time comes, physicians
ought to moderate the charges for these remedial agents. Outside of
our large cities, the cost of taking sulphur vapor-baths is $5 each,
and they are given only in series, as prescribed by the judgment or
humor of the physician. When will people learn the laws and habits
of their own bodies, so that they need not be at the mercy of every
specialist who chooses to make money out of their emergencies? For the
benefit of outsiders it ought to be said that the charge in the best
establishments of New York is not higher than $2 50 for the single
bath, and a great reduction from this is common.
The essential difficulty of the sulphur vapor treatment is to keep from
the face the powerful fumes, which are dangerous to breathe. For this
object the bather enters a wooden box, with a cover that fits the
neck. She takes a seat in the box undressed, and the cover is adjusted
so that only the head is left out. Cloths or a rubber collar are
closely drawn about the neck to prevent the least escape of gas, and a
wet sponge is laid on the top of the head, or, what is better, a very
wet towel folded turbanwise round the back of it, and over the top,
thus cooling the base of the brain, the side arteries, and sensitive
upper part. This compress must be frequently wet with cold water during
the bath--a precaution which removes the danger of apoplectic seizures
by the intense heating of the blood. Steam charged with sulphur is then
let into the box by pipes, and in three minutes the perspiration flows
as if the luckless victim were melting away. In the best establishments
an attendant fans the bather all the time the steam is let on, to cool
the head, into which the heated blood rushes in a way that makes the
wet towel smoke directly. And this is an attention the patient must
insist upon, for faintness or apoplexy may be the alternative.
In the sultry and oppressive weather of summer the hot bath is of all
others most cooling. No matter how heated the system, water as hot
as possible is the safest and most efficient relief. One wants to
remain in it long enough to give every part of the body a thorough
scrubbing with soap and a mohair wash-cloth, which cleanses the skin
more thoroughly than a brush. The hot water dissolves every particle
of matter that clogs the pores, the rough cloth and soap remove it
searchingly, and the towel is hardly laid aside before a delicious
coolness and freshness passes upon one, like that of a dewy summer
morning. The dangers resulting from a sudden check of perspiration by
plunging into cold water when overheated, or by sitting in a draught
to cool, are avoided, and a greater sense of coolness follows. People
who suffer much in warm weather should reckon this a daily solace. All
enervating effects are warded off by an instant’s plunge into cool
water of, say, seventy degrees. I say cool, for it certainly will feel
as if iced after a bath of nearly a hundred and fifty degrees. In a
common bath-room, by this means, one may experience much of the real
benefit of a Russian vapor-bath.
The bath lasts fifteen minutes, when the vapor is turned off. When the
steam in the box has had time to condense, the cover is unjointed,
and the bather treated to a scrubbing with soap and warm water, which
gradually cools and cleanses the body. Then cooler water is poured over
the body, and, after wiping, one is wrapped in a fresh sheet and lies
down to pleasant dreams.
It is hard that such a necessary requisite to the highest vigor should
rank, as it does, among luxuries. One can hardly imagine an addition
to a fine house more desirable than a bathing-hall, such as Roman
patricians added to their palaces, where any form of vapor or hot bath
was at command.
Many improvements are needed in our public baths. There should be small
dressing-closets, as there are at swimming-baths, where one’s clothes
may be kept from contact with beds on which a thousand people rest in
the course of a year. The reposing-hall should be well lighted, and
paved with tiles, instead of being spread with bits of carpet to be
tossed about; and there should be ample space between the couches.
Every thing should convey the impression of space and repose--of
sunshine, for the sake of its reviving power, and of refinement, for
the soothing it always brings the nerves.
Usually the bath-house is built in a court-yard, where high walls on
every side shut out the sunlight. The basement dressing-room is filled
with narrow couches covered with light rubber sheets, suggestive of
nothing more pleasant than cast-off clothing, and rest measured by the
bath clock, when one’s pillow must be given up to a new-comer.
From this huddled room the bather steps into one beyond summer heat,
dark and dripping with moisture, with a plunge bath in the centre.
Passing through it, one finds next what seems like a wide marble
staircase running the length of each side almost to the low roof, with
gratings let in the face of the steps. The bather ascends one of these
stony couches, and lies down with head on the stony pillow carved every
six feet or so for the purpose. Wrapped in a sheet, already wet with
moisture since leaving the dressing-room, a large sponge dipped in cold
water at the back of one’s head, and another at the mouth and nose,
one feels as if there were perspiration enough already for sanitary
purposes; but when, with a hiss and a roar, the steam is let on through
the gratings, one finds the difference. Rolling vapor fills the room,
so dense that every outline is shut out as completely as in the darkest
night. The heat rises to suffocation, the new bather thinks, and rushes
again and again to the douche against the wall to wet her throbbing
head, or into the next room, which seems cool as a waterfall, for
a gasp of air that she can breathe. Old and experienced bathers lie
still, declaring that, with head down and the wet sponge pressed to
the nose, they breathe without difficulty. What was perspiration is
literally a flowing away in rills and sheets of water that drip from
the bather’s reeking sides. One seems to have turned to jelly, and
submits helplessly to the scrubbing-brush and final shower-bath of
water at eighty degrees, which causes a shiver by contrast.
The outer room is refreshing in its coolness, and one wraps a dry sheet
and blanket round one and lies down on the India-rubber cloth in dreamy
indifference to all the rest of the world.
What follows is Elysium. Every ache and pain, every care, is dispelled
in a trance of rest.
All the descriptions by Eastern travelers of the luxury of the bath
are found true in this last stage of enjoyment. One is rejuvenated,
entranced, and sinks into a light sleep, whose approach seems a prelude
to paradise. The eyes close to keep out the sordid surroundings of the
bathing-room; and every idea, or rather sensation--for the brain is too
passive to think--is bliss. This is the _dolce far niente_ Italians
aspire to--the sum of all delight possible to sensation. Passion and
rapture have no charms that equal it. It is the death and extinction
of all pain. Quite as beautiful is the return to consciousness, sense
after sense regaining double brightness as softly and steadily as the
unfolding of a flower.
After a reluctant waking and going out into the sunlight again one
seems to have found a new self. The feather-like lightness and
elasticity of every limb amount almost to delirium, they are so
different from one’s usual dullness. It is freedom that feels like
flying. If this is simply health, in our common state we must be
farther toward extinction than we imagine.
In this state of purity and light one learns to reverence one’s
physical self. A body that at its best is so glorious and happy ought
not to be exposed to the disturbance of appetite and the contact of
gross things. We need to be very much more refined in our living,
eating, and breathing. We ought to be nicer about our clothes and our
food, choosing the best of meats, and fruit far better than we are now
content with, and should place our dwellings out of the reach of the
least impure air. In this altered and steadied frame evil dispositions
lose their sway. Irritable temper is soothed, despondency flees as by
magic, and fiercer passions lie asleep as at the stroking of their
manes. If any one should read this page who battles with unnatural
desires, which make life less blessed and lofty than it was meant to
be, let her have recourse to this efficient ally. It will restore one
from the horrible depression which craves alcohol or opium, it will
rescue from the perilous excitement of overwrought nerves or too much
brain-work, and banish those morbid feelings which consciously or
unconsciously incline to impurity of imagination if not of life. The
purity of the body and the soul are too closely interwoven for any one
to dare neglect them.
In the old time, saints used to subdue the body by prayer and fasting.
The modern way is by prayer and bathing.
It is hard enough to keep a peaceable, firm, and sweet habit of soul
without letting loose on it the humors and insanities of the body.
These are in no way so surely quelled as by warm baths, and this is why
they ought to be among the public buildings of every village, and made
as cheap as possible. There the drunkard might find a stimulus which
has no reaction, the emotionally insane a sedative that would clear his
brain and steady his nerves. There the exhausted watcher by the sick
might recruit, and the overwrought student, lawyer, or physician find
support without recourse to perilous stimulants. The doors of such a
place in a large city should stand open night and day, like those of
churches.
Women need the bath for all these purposes even more than men. The
feeble mother will find no soothing for her jarred nerves or lightener
of her burdens like the well-applied bath. Strange as it sounds, the
vapor-bath does not weaken. It washes away the worse particles of the
body that weigh it down, and leaves it as if winged. I have known an
invalid of years take it twice and thrice a week, gaining strength
every time. If harm came, it is because the head was not kept cool
by fanning, or because the final sponging was not gradual enough.
There is harm in every remedy used unskillfully. It is the doctor’s
province to direct in such matters, always premising that the best and
wisest physicians prefer to teach their clients the rules of health
and treatment for themselves, and seldom refuse to give the reason and
theory of their orders. It is safe to be shy of the perceptions and
methods of a doctor who doesn’t like to tell what medicines he gives,
and why he gives them. The keenest and best medical men are impatient
to have others see and understand the truth as well as themselves.
CHAPTER XXI.
Devices of Uneasy Age.--Bread Paste and Court-plaster to Conceal
Wrinkles.--Accepting the Situation.--Plain Women and Agreeable
Toilets.--Examples.--The Rector’s Daughter.--Dressing on Two Hundred
a Year.--Écru Linen and White Nansook.--A Senator’s Wife.--A
Washington Success.--Dull, Thin Faces.--Hay-colored Hair.--Advantages
of Lining Rooms with Mirrors.
Did you ever go to see a lady, not of uncertain but of uneasy age, and
find yourself ushered into the family sitting-room by a new servant,
who did not know the ways of the house? Did you find her with a
court-plaster lozenge an inch wide between her eyes, and one at the
outer ends of her eyebrows? At sight of this remarkable ornament,
did concern express itself lest she had fallen down stairs, or had a
difference with the cat? Were these insinuations parried with veteran
resources, and were you dissuaded from further inquiry by the delicate
remark that she could interest you better than by giving the history
of her scratches? Of course you knew there was a mystery about those
bits of court-plaster, and perhaps feel so to this day, unless Nature
have given you the mind of a detective. If so, your patience is to be
rewarded. The secret of those patches was not scratches, but wrinkles.
I trust due tribute will be paid to the ingenuity of failing age, which
has perfected this device for warding off its unwelcome tokens. The
rationale of the plan is very simple. The plaster contracts the skin,
and prevents its sinking into creases and lines. It also protects and
softens the skin. I have heard of one oldish lady who wears these
ornamental appendages all the time in the house when not receiving
company, and covers parts of her face with a dough made of well-mumbled
bread to keep her complexion fair. The heroism of this resistance to
time must be applauded, but it is an open question whether the play is
worth the candle. The beauty of age lies not in freshness like that of
sixteen, but in clear and lofty expression, in the look of experience
and not unkindly shrewdness, in the finish of self-repression, of
calmness, trust, and sympathy. These things grow on a face as it
loses freshness and roundness, just as the sky begins to show through
thinning boughs.
The greatest of blessings for some people would be to learn to accept
themselves and their gifts. If they could stand apart from themselves
a while to see their becoming points, much of their repining would be
dropped. Every thing and every body is beautiful in its season. There
is a wholesome plainness that accords with domestic life and natural
surroundings, as the bark of trees relieves their green. The color of
health, the gentleness and sweetness that come of a conquered self,
are elements of beauty that make any face tolerable. How dear are the
plain faces that have watched our childhood, with whom we have grown
up so closely that feature and form have lost their significance, so
that we really do not know whether they are homely or not, and see
only the love or the humor that lives in their faces. In general, very
ugly people are happily indifferent to their looks, and degrees of
imperfection may always be lessened by judicious use of the arts of
dress.
A young and homely woman makes herself agreeable by the complete
neatness of a very simple toilet. Let her eschew dresses of two colors,
or of two shades even, though the latter are allowable, if the shadings
are very soft. When the complexion is dull, there must be some warm or
lively tinges of color in the costume, and vice versa. But it is easier
to dress real figures than to generalize.
Cornelia Jackson is the rector’s daughter, and hasn’t above $200 a year
to spend on her clothes and to buy Christmas presents. She is a little
too plump, is brown, with some warm color in her cheeks in summer, and
has dark hair. Her face never would be noticed except for the jollity
lurking in it, which she inherits from her father. In winter and fall,
when she looks pale, she “tones up” with a morning dress of all-wool
stuff, one of those brown grounds with small bunches of brilliant
crimson or purple flowers--a cheery pattern that the rector likes
behind the coffee urn of a cold morning--with crisp white ruffles, set
off by the brown dress. Crimson or purple, in soft brilliant shades,
are her colors for neck-ties. Her street dress is a dark walnut-brown
cloth, trimmed with cross-cut velvet the same shade. The over-skirts
of Cornelia’s dresses are always long, so that she will not look like
a fishing-bob or a doll pin-cushion; and there is deep rose-color
about her bonnet. Not roses, by the way--she has an unspoken feeling
that it is not for every body to wear roses--but velvety mallows and
double stocks, imitations of fragrant common garden flowers that are
very like herself. The brown and crimson maiden is a pleasant sight
of a winter’s day, when the gray of the church and white of the snow
need something warm to come between them. In summer she chooses, or
her cousin in New York chooses for her, not the light percales that
every one else is wearing, nor the grays and stone-colors that walk to
church every Sunday, but écru linens, with relief of black or brown for
morning, when she goes from pantry to garden, and from sewing-machine
to nursery. Afternoons she doesn’t divide herself by putting on a white
blouse and colored skirt, or a buff redingote over a black train, but
wears a dress of one color, that looks as if it were meant to stay at
home. White nansook is her delight, its semi-transparency wonderfully
suiting her clear brownness, but solid white linen or cambric she
eschews. Soft violet jaconet, and the whole family of lilacs, are
made for her; and she is luxurious in ruffles and flounces on her
demi-trained skirts, since she makes and often irons them herself.
Black grenadine, of course, she wears, with high lining to give her
waist its full length, every bit of which it needs; and she is not too
utilitarian to neglect the aid which a modest demi-train on a house
dress gives to her height. All the other girls may wear puffed waists
and pleated waists. She knows they are not for her plump shoulders,
though clusters of fine tucks on a blouse give length to the waist,
and lessen the width of the back. Shawls she never wears, nor short
perky basques, that are considered--I don’t know why--the proper thing
for stout figures. Her choice is the long polonaise, and the French
jacket, which by its short shoulders and simple lines conveys a decent
comeliness of figure to any one who wears it. If she had a party dress,
it would be white muslin, or light silvery green silk, trimmed with
pleatings of tulle, and with them she would wear her mother’s pearls,
or her own fine carbuncles.
Mrs. Senator, with all her fortune and position, is doomed to hear
people speak of her in under-tones at parties, “She is rich, but very
plain.” Being a shrewd woman, she does not waste her efforts on trying
to alter her thin features, nor does she make herself ridiculous by
a false complexion of rouge and pearl-powder, though her face and her
hair are about of a brownness. But on her entry into Washington society
she defied criticism by appearing with her hair créped to show its
soft brown lights and shades, and give the best outline to her head,
her gypsy face opposed to a dead white silk, of Parisian origin, with
flounce of pleated muslin, and corsage trimmings of rich lace. It is
a real dress and a real woman that is described, and it is no fiction
that she was the success of the evening. The colorless dress without
_reflets_, and her ornaments of clustered pearls, were in most artistic
contrast to the nut-brown hair and dusky face. A spot of color would
have destroyed the charm. The dress stamped her, as she was, a woman
of skill sufficient to draw from the most unlikely combination the
elements of novel and complete success.
The girl who sits near me at the hotel table tries my eyes with her
thin, curious features, her pale, frizzed hair, that makes her face
more peaked than it is, and her oversized skirts. She ought not to wear
those light dresses, for she has no color, and her thin complexion is
not even clear. She has that difficult figure to dispose of, which is
at once girlish and tall, without seeming so. A trained dress would
make her look lean, so she should dispense with a large tournure, and
let her dresses brush the floor a few inches, wearing as many small
flounces below the knee as fashion and sense allow. If her mother, who
is rather a strict lady, would insist on having the girl’s dresses made
with puffed waists, or loose blouses of thick linen, instead of the
Victoria lawns that iron so flat, and show the poor shoulder-blades
frightfully, the effect would be rather delightful. She ought to wear
puffed grenadines and lenos of maroon, rosy lilac, or deep green--the
first lighted with pale rosy bows at the throat and in the hair, the
latter with light green and white, the lilac with periwinkle knots. How
one would like to dress her over again, and turn the poor thing out
charming as she ought to be. Her hair-dressing would all have to be
done over again. Sharp-featured people shouldn’t wear curls, which make
the peaked effect still more prominent. Soft waves, drawn lightly away
from the face and brushed up from the neck behind, would be better, and
smooth braids best of all, with little waves peeping out under them. If
the young woman could train herself not to be excitable, or to smile so
overcomingly, and not be so eager to meet new acquaintances, she would
make a pleasing impression, while now she gets snubbed in a tacit way,
and those who take her up out of pity hardly feel as if they were paid
for it. If women with hay-colored hair could be brought to believe that
light brown, of all others, wasn’t the color for their style, one could
afford to overlook minor deficiencies.
One is tempted to think sometimes that there is a loss in not adopting
the French plan of lining houses with mirrors. If people continually
caught sight of themselves, they would hardly indulge in the grimaces
and gaucheries which they inflict on the world. It could hardly lead to
vanity in most cases, and would settle many vexing problems of dress
and demeanor. One is not always to be censured for studying the glass.
The orator must use it to learn how to deliver his sentences with
proper facial play and easy gesture. The public singer studies with a
mirror on the music-rack to get the right position of the mouth for
issuing the voice without making a face. The want of such training mars
the work of some great artists with blemishes which nearly undo the
effect of their talents.
The injunction that all things should be done decently and in order
means that they ought to be pleasing. The study of ourselves can
hardly be complete without the aid of the mirror, which shows candidly
the cold smile, the vacant, bashful gaze, we give our fellow-beings,
instead of the decent attention, the kind, full glance it is meet
they should have from us, and which we prefer to receive from them.
It shows the frown, the sour melancholy, which creep over the face in
reveries, and leads us to try and feel pleasant that we may look so.
How much confidence one assuring glance at a mirror has given us in
going to receive a visitor, and what kindly warning of what was amiss
in expression or toilet before it was too late! Is our vanity so easily
excited that we are ready to fall in love with ourselves at sight? The
intimate acquaintance with our appearance which the glass can give is
more likely to make one genuinely humble. In a world which owns among
its maxims the gay and wicked refrain of “manners for us, morals for
those who like them,” good people can not afford to neglect either
their toilets or their mirrors.
CHAPTER XXII.
Physical Education of Girls.--A Woman’s Value in the World.--High-bred
Figures.--Antique Races.--Inspiration of Art not Vanity.--The
Trying Age.--Dress, Food, and Bathing for Young Girls.--A Veto
on Close Study.--Braces and Backboards.--Never Talk of Girls’
Feelings.--Exercise for the Arms.--Singing Scales with Corsets
off.--Development of the Bust.--Open-work Corsets the Best.--The
Bayaderes of India and their Forms.--The Delicacy due Young Girls.--A
Frank but Needed Caution.--Care of the Figure after Nursing.
American girls begin to make much of physical culture. As they advance
in refinement they see how much of their value in society depends on
the nerve and spirit which accompanies thorough development. It is not
enough that they know how to dance languidly, and carry themselves in
company. To distinguish herself, a young belle must row, swim, skate,
ride, and even shoot, to say nothing of lessons in fencing, which
noble ladies in Germany, and some of foreign family here, take to
develop sureness of hand and agility. The heavy, flat-footed creature
who can not walk across a room without betraying the bad terms her
joints are on with each other, must have a splendid face and fortune
to keep any place in the world, no matter how good her family, or how
varied her acquirements, though she speaks seven languages like a
native, and has played sonatas since she was eight years old. A woman’s
value depends entirely on her use to the world and to that person who
happens to have the most of her society. A man likes the society of
a woman who can walk a mile or two to see an interesting view, and
can take long journeys without being laid up by them. He likes smooth
motions, round arms and throat, head held straight, and shoulders that
do not bow out. When you see that a fine figure must be a straight line
from the roots of the hair to the base of the shoulder-blade, you will
realize how few women approach this high-bred ideal. Special culture,
indeed, is discerned where such excellence of line meets the eye. The
polished races of the East, who, untutored and degraded, yet have the
entail of antique subtlety and art, inherit such figures along with the
proverbs of sages and palace mosaics. The best-born of all countries
have this noble set of head, this lance-like figure, and easy play of
limb. As surely as one can be educated to right thoughts and manners,
so the motions and poise of limb can be trained to correctness. The
work must begin early. A girl should be put in training as soon as
she passes from the plumpness of childhood into the ugly age of
development. The mother should inspect her dressing to see what
improvement is needed, and stimulate the child by the desire to possess
beautiful limbs and figure. The senses are early awake to the sense of
grace. There is no better way to inspire a girl with it than to take
her to picture-galleries, show the faces of historical beauties, or
the figures of Italian sculpture, and ask her if she would not like
to have the same fine points herself. This substitutes the love of art
for that of admiration, and makes self-cultivation too deep a thing for
vanity.
There is a time when girls are awkward, indolent, and capricious. Their
boisterous spirits at one time, their sickly minauderies at another,
are very trying to mothers and teachers. The cause is often set down
as depravity, when it is only nature. Girls are lapsided and indolent
because they are weak or languid, between which and being lazy there
is a vast difference. They have demanding appetites that strike grown
people with wonder. They go frantic on short notice when their wishes
are crossed. Mother, if such is the case, your growing girl is weak.
The nursery bath Saturday night is not enough. Encourage her to take
a sponge-bath every day. When she comes in heated from a long walk or
play, see that she bathes her knees, elbows, and feet in cold water,
to prevent her growing nervous with fatigue when the excitement is
over. See that she does not suffer from cold, and that she is not too
warmly dressed, remembering a plump, active child will suffer with
heat under the clothes it takes to keep you comfortable. If she is
thin and sensitive, care must be taken against sudden chills. Keep
her on very simple but well-flavored diet, with plenty of sour fruit,
if she crave it, for the young have a facility for growing bilious,
which acids correct. Sweet-pickles not too highly spiced are favorites
with children, and better than sweetmeats. Nuts and raisins are more
wholesome than candies. New cheese and cream are to be preferred to
butter with bread and vegetables. Soup and a little of the best and
juiciest meat should be given at dinner. But the miscellaneous stuffing
that half-grown girls are allowed to indulge in ruins their complexion,
temper, and digestion. No coffee nor tea should be taken by any human
being till it is full-grown. The excitement of young nerves by these
drinks is ruinous. Besides, the luxury and the stimulus is greater to
the adult when debarred from these things through childhood. Neither
mind nor body should be worked till maturity. Children will do all they
ought in study and work without much urging; and they will learn more
and remember more in two hours of study to five of play, than if the
order is inverted. Say to a child, Get this lesson and you may go to
play--and you will be astonished to see how rapidly it learns; but if
one lesson is to succeed another till six dreary hours have dragged
away, it loses heart, and learns merely what can not well be helped.
A girl under eighteen ought not to practice at the piano or sit at a
desk more than three quarters of an hour at a time. Then she should run
out-of-doors ten minutes, or exercise, to relieve the nerves. An adult
never ought to study or sit more than an hour without brief change
before passing to the next. This keeps the head clearer, the limbs
fresher, and carries one through a day with less fatigue than if one
worked eight hours and then rested four.
Thoughtful teachers do not share the prejudice against braces and
backboards for keeping the figure straight, especially when young. It
is the instinct of barbarous nations to use such aids in compelling
erectness in their children. These appliances need not be painful
in the least, but rather relieve tender muscles and bones. Languid
girls should take cool sitz-baths to strengthen the muscles of the
back and hips, which are more than ordinarily susceptible of fatigue
when childhood is over. But _never_ talk of a girl’s feelings in mind
or body before her, or suffer her to dwell on them. The effect is
bad physically and mentally. See that these injunctions are obeyed
implicitly; spare her the whys and wherefores. It is enough for her
to know that she will feel better for them. Of all things, deliver us
from valetudinarians of fifteen. Never laugh at them; never sneer;
never indulge them in self-condolings. Be pitiful and sympathetic,
but steadily turn their attention to something interesting outside of
themselves.
Special means are essential to special growth. Throwing quoits and
sweeping are good exercises to develop the arms. There is nothing like
three hours of house-work a day for giving a woman a good figure, and
if she sleep in tight cosmetic gloves, she need not fear that her hands
will be spoiled. The time to form the hands is in youth, and with
thimbles for the finger-tips, and close gloves lined with cold cream,
every mother might secure a good hand for her daughter. She should be
particular to see that long-wristed lisle-thread gloves are drawn on
every time the girl goes out. Veils she should discard, except in cold
and windy weather, when they should be drawn close over the head. A
broad-leafed hat for the country is protection enough for the summer;
the rest of the year the complexion needs all the sun it can get.
There is commonly a want of fullness in those muscles of the shoulder
which give its graceful slope. This is developed by the use of the
skipping-rope, in swinging it over the head, and by battledoor, which
keeps the arms extended, at the same time using the muscles of the neck
and shoulders. Swinging by the hands from a rope is capital, and so is
swinging from a bar. These muscles are the last to receive exercise in
common modes of life, and playing ball, bean-bags, or pillow-fights
are convenient ways of calling them into action. Singing scales with
corsets off, shoulders thrown back, lungs deeply inflated, mouth wide
open, and breath held, is the best tuition for insuring that fullness
to the upper part of the chest which gives majesty to a figure even
when the bust is meagre. These scales should be practiced half an hour
morning and afternoon, gaining two ends at once--increase of voice and
perfection of figure.
This brings us to the inquiries made by more than one correspondent
for some means of developing the bust. Every mother should pay
attention to this matter before her daughters think of such a thing
for themselves, by seeing that their dresses are never in the least
constricted across the chest, and that a foolish dressmaker never puts
padding into their waists. The horrible custom of wearing pads is the
ruin of natural figures, by heating and pressing down the bosom. This
most delicate and sensitive part of a woman’s form must always be kept
cool, and well supported by a linen corset. The open-worked ones are by
far the best, and the compression, if any, should not be over the heart
and fixed ribs, as it generally is, but just at the waist, for not more
than the width of a broad waistband. Six inches of thick coutille over
the heart and stomach--those parts of the body that have most vital
heat--must surely disorder them and affect the bust as well. It would
be better if the coutille were over the shoulders or the abdomen, and
the whalebones of the corset held together by broad tapes, so that
there would be less dressing over the heart, instead of more. A low,
deep bosom, rather than a bold one, is a sign of grace in a full-grown
woman, and a full bust is hardly admirable in an unmarried girl. Her
figure should be all curves, but slender, promising a fuller beauty
when maturity is reached. One is not fond of over-ripe pears.
Flat figures are best dissembled by puffed and shirred blouse-waists,
or by corsets with a fine rattan run in the top of the bosom gore,
which throws out the fullness sufficiently to look well in a plain
corsage. Of all things, India-rubber pads act most injuriously by
constantly sweating the skin, and ruining the bust beyond hope of
restoration. To improve its outlines, wear a linen corset fitting
so close at the end of the top gores as to support the bosom well.
For this the corset must be fitted to the skin, and worn next the
under-flannel. Night and morning wash the bust in the coldest
water--sponging it upward, but never down. Madame Celnart relates that
the bayaderes of India cultivate their forms by wearing a cincture
of linen under the breasts, and at night chafing them lightly with
a piece of linen. The breasts should never be touched but with the
utmost delicacy, as other treatment renders them weak and flaccid,
and not unfrequently results in cancer. A baby’s bite has more than
once inflicted this disease upon its mother. But one thing is to be
solemnly cautioned, that no human being--doctor, nurse, nor the mother
herself--on any pretense, save in case of accident, be allowed to touch
a girl’s figure. It would be unnecessary to say this, were not French
and Irish nurses, especially old and experienced, ones, sometimes in
the habit of stroking the figures of young girls committed to their
charge, with the idea of developing them. This is not mentioned
from hearsay. Mothers can not be too careful how they leave their
children with even well-meaning servants. A young girl’s body is more
sensitive than any harp is to the air that plays upon it. Nature--free,
uneducated, and direct--responds to every touch on that seat of the
nerves, the bosom, by an excitement that is simply ruinous to a
child’s nervous system. This is pretty plain talking, but no plainer
than the subject demands. Girls are very different in their feelings.
Some affectionate, innocent, hearty natures remain through their
lives as simple as when they were babes taking their bath under their
mothers’ hands; while others, equally innocent but more susceptible,
require to be guarded and sheltered even from the violence of a caress
as if from contagion and pain.
Due attention to the general health always has its effect in restoring
the bust to its roundness. It is a mistake that it is irremediably
injured by nursing children. A babe may be taught not to pinch and bite
its mother, and the exercise of a natural function can injure her in no
way, if proper care is taken to sustain the system at the same time.
Cold compresses of wet linen worn over the breast are very soothing
and beneficial, provided they do not strike a chill to a weak chest.
At the same time, the cincture should be carefully adjusted. Weakness
of any kind affects the contour of the figure, and it is useless to
try to improve it in any other way than by restoring the strength
where it is wanting. Tepid sitz-baths strengthen the muscles of the
hips, and do away with that dragging which injures the firmness of
the bosom. Bathing in water to which ammonia is added strengthens the
skin, but the use of camphor to dry the milk after weaning a child is
reprehensible. No drying or heating lotions of any kind should ever be
applied except in illness.
CHAPTER XXIII.
Hands and Complexions.--Preparing for Parties.--Refining Rough
Faces.--Carbolic Baths.--Chalk and Cascarilla.--Glycerine
Wash.--School-girls’ Flushed Hands and Faces.--To Soften the
Hands.--Red Noses.--Secrets of Making-up.--Cologne for the
Eyes.--Cosmetic Gloves.--To Impart a Brilliant Complexion.
People are in trouble in cold weather about their hands and their
complexions, which take the time when parties abound, and owners
need their very best looks, to put on a ruinous air. It is more than
suspected that the young lady who begs for some good face powder or
wash that will hide a bad complexion without spoiling it entirely,
has the end in view of making herself presentable in society for the
winter. Her entirely reasonable request shall be attended to, no less
on her own account than because she writes in the name of four devoted
subscribers. Carbolic soaps fail to remove the roughness of her used
complexion, and internal remedies must be resorted to. These should
be prescribed by a physician, and would be passed over at once to his
province had not long experience shown that doctors scoff at the idea
of prescribing for such puny troubles as flesh-worms and pimples while
there are so many typhoid fevers and chronic ulcers to be treated.
The pimples foretold the fever, and the impurities that first showed
themselves in the shape of “black-heads” might have been discharged
at the time, and not left to malignant issues. Pimples are disease
of a light form, and nature tries to throw off in this way bad blood
that might give one a worse turn if kept in the body. It can not be
said too often that next to keeping murder and wickedness out of one’s
soul is the necessity of keeping one’s blood pure by good food, strict
cleanliness, warmth, and bright, sweet air. These troublesome pimples
are a sign that the young ladies who complain of them have eaten
food that did not suit them, eaten irregularly, or not bathed often
enough, since some skins require more frequent cleansing and stimulus
than others, because they secrete more. Perhaps other functions are
disturbed, or the blood is not stirred enough by lively exercise.
Directions for diet have been given before in these pages. It will be
enough to recommend people with irritable blood to drink a glass or
two of mild cider, or eat oranges or lemons, as they fancy, within
the half hour before each meal, especially before breakfast. As hard
work or exercise as one can endure stirs sluggish secretions, and work
should always be brisk. Many a young woman mopes over house-work day
after day, standing on her feet most of the time, and fancies that she
has exercise, when her slow blood does not once in ten hours receive
impulse enough to send it vigorously from head to foot in a way one
could call living. “Work swiftly and rest well,” ought to be a woman’s
rule. When the blood flows swiftly, the eye is clear, the sight better,
the skin refined, and the whole body feels improvement; memory and
thought are improved, idleness takes wing, and happiness steals into
the heart.
Young ladies should not give up their bathing with carbolic soap. Hot
water, with a spoonful of prophylactic fluid or phenyl to each quart,
is a very wholesome bath in skin disorders, followed by a brisk rub
with crash till warm, or wrapping in a blanket by the fire till all
danger of chilliness is past. The phenyl and prophylactic fluid are
milder forms of carbolic acid, and, like it, disinfectant and healing.
A sponge-bath or plunge at seventy-five degrees after a hot bath
prevents all weakening effects and taking cold. None but robust persons
should ever take baths except in a warm room. The bath-room should
always be so arranged as to be heated in a few minutes. Otherwise the
bath is best taken in one’s own room before the fire.
The disguise for a bad skin is easily found. Refined chalk is the
safest thing to use, and costs far less by its own name than put up
in photograph boxes as “Lily White,” etc. Cascarilla powder, which
the Cuban ladies use so much, is recommended as entirely harmless.
It is prepared from a root used in medicine, and in New York is
sold at all the little Cuban shops, with cigars, tropic sweetmeats,
and other necessaries of life. Either wash the face with thick suds
from glycerine soap, and dust the powder on with a swan’s-down puff,
removing superfluous traces with a fresh puff kept for the purpose,
or else grind the powder in wet linen by pressing it in the fingers,
and apply what oozes through to the skin. A fine wash for a rough or
sunburned skin is made of two ounces of distilled water, one ounce
of glycerine, one ounce of alcohol, and half an ounce of tincture
of benzoin. Without the water, and with the addition of two ounces
of prepared chalk free from bismuth, it makes a far better cosmetic
for whitening the face than any of the expensive “Balms of Youth” or
“Magnolia Blooms.” If a flesh tint is desired, add a grain of carmine.
The lesser trial of rough, red hands that are not chapped but
unsightly, when not caused by exposure and work, indicates bad
circulation of the blood. School-girls who study a good deal without
due exercise often go home with flushed faces and red hands, to say
nothing of an irritable state of the nerves, that can only be righted
by very regular sleep and exercise, aided by hot foot-baths. Out-door
exercise in winter is an excellent corrective for rush of blood to the
head. Dancing brings the blood into play more healthfully than any
movement allowed to grown women. The hands are improved by wearing
gloves that fit closely, especially if they are of soft castor or
dog-skin. In most cases, all that is needed to soften hands is to rub
sweet-almond oil into the skin two or three days in succession. A
quicker way than this in the country is to hold the hand on a rapidly
turning grindstone a moment or two. It leaves the palm, forefinger, and
thumb satin smooth, and removes callosities incredibly quick, taking
off bad stains at the same time. Farmers’ girls will take note of
this, and also that rubbing the hands with a slice of raw potato will
remove vegetable stains. Rubbing the hands well with almond-oil, and
plastering them with as much fine chalk as they can take, on going to
bed, will usually whiten them in three days’ time, and this hint may be
of service before a party of consequence.
Redness of the nose is a sign of bad circulation and of humor in the
blood. It is best treated by applications of phenyl, rubbed on often
each day, and by alteratives. A spoonful of white mustard-seed taken
in water before breakfast every morning is of service in this case
and in rush of blood to the head, which always has something to do
with constipation. Refined chalk made into a thick plaster with one
third as much glycerine as water, and spread on the parts, will cool
erysipelatous inflammation and reduce the redness.
The secrets of “making-up” have hardly all been mentioned, though the
list is growing long. What girl does not know that eating lump-sugar
wet with Cologne just before going out will make her eyes bright, or
that the homelier mode of flirting soap-suds into them has the same
effect? Spanish ladies squeeze orange juice into their eyes to make
them shine. A Continental recipe for whitening the hands looks strong
enough: Take half a pound of soft-soap, a gill of salad-oil, an ounce
of mutton tallow, and boil together; after boiling ceases, add one
gill of spirits of wine and a scruple of ambergris; rip a pair of
gloves three sizes too large, spread them with this paste, and sew up
to be worn at night. A curious wash, evidently Italian in its origin,
is: Equal parts of melon, pumpkin, gourd, and cucumber seeds pounded
to powder, softened with cream, and thinned to a paste with milk,
perfumed with a grain of musk and three drops of oil of lemon (oil of
jasmine may be substituted for the musk). The face, bosom, and arms
are anointed with this overnight, and washed off in warm water in
the morning. The authority quoted says it adds remarkable purity and
brilliance to the complexion. Such pains will women take for that
beauty which, after all, is only skin deep. But did not De Staël say
she would give half her knowledge for personal charms.
CHAPTER XXIV.
Women’s Looks and Nerves.--A Low-toned Generation.--Children and their
Ways.--Brief Madness.--Women in the Woods.--Singing.--Work well done
the Easiest.--Sleep the Remedy for Temper.--Hours for Sleep.--The
Great Medicines--Sunshine, Music, Work, and Sleep.
Women’s looks depend too much on the state of their nerves and their
peace of mind to pass them over. The body at best is the perfect
expression of the soul. The latter may light wasted features to
brilliance, or turn a face of milk and roses dark with passion or dead
with dullness; it may destroy a healthy frame or support a failing one.
Weak nerves may prove too much for the temper of St. John, and break
down the courage of Saladin. Better things are before us, coming from a
fuller appreciation of the needs of body and soul, but the fact remains
that this is a generation of weak nerves. It shows particularly in the
low tone of spirits common to men and women. They can not bear sunshine
in their houses; they find the colors of Jacques Minot roses and of
Gérome’s pictures too deep; the waltz in _Traviata_ is too brilliant,
Rossini’s music is too sensuous, and Wagner’s too sensational;
Mendelssohn is too light, Beethoven too cold. Their work is fuss;
instead of resting, they idle--and there is a wide difference between
the two things. People who drink strong tea and smoke too many cigars,
read or stay in-doors too much, find the hum of creation too loud for
them. The swell of the wind in the pines makes them gloomy, the sweep
of the storm prostrates them with terror, the everlasting beating of
the surf and the noises of the streets alike weary their worthless
nerves. The happy cries of school-children at play are a grievance to
them; indeed, there are people who find the chirp of the hearth cricket
and the singing tea-kettle intolerable. But it is a sign of diseased
nerves. Nature is full of noises, and only where death reigns is there
silence. One wishes that the men and women who can’t bear a child’s
voice, a singer’s practice, or the passing of feet up and down stairs
might be transported to silence like that which wraps the poles or
the spaces beyond the stars, till they could learn to welcome sound,
without which no one lives.
Children must make noise, and a great deal of it, to be healthy. The
shouts, the racket, the tumble and turmoil they make, are nature’s
way of ventilating their bodies, of sending the breath full into the
very last corner of the lungs, and the blood and nervous fluid into
every cord and fibre of their muscles. Instead of quelling their riot,
it would be a blessing to older folks to join it with them. There is
an awful truth following this assertion. Do you know that men and
women go mad after the natural stimulus which free air and bounding
exercise supply? It is the lack of this most powerful inspiration,
which knows no reaction, that makes them drunkards, gamesters, and
flings them into every dissipation of body and soul. Men and women,
especially those leading studious, repressed lives, often confess to a
longing for some fierce, brief madness that would unseat the incubus
of their lives. Clergymen, editors, writing women, and those who lead
sedentary lives, have said in your hearing and mine that something
ailed them they could not understand. They felt as if they would like
to go on a spree, dance the tarantella, or scream till they were tired.
They thought it the moving of some depraved impulse not yet rooted
out of their natures, and to subdue it cost them hours of struggle
and mortification. Poor souls! They need not have visited themselves
severely if they had known the truth that this lawless longing was
the cry of idle nerve and muscle, frantic through disuse. What the
clergyman wanted was to leave his books and his subdued demeanor for
the hill-country, for the woods, where he could not only walk, but
leap, run, shout, and wrestle, and sing at the full strength of his
voice. The editor needed to leave his cigar and the midnight gas-light
for a wherry race, or a jolly roll and tumble on the green. The woman,
most of all, wanted a tent built for her on the shore, or on the dry
heights of the pine forest, where she would have to take sun by day
and balsamic air by night; where she would have to leap brooks, gather
her own fire-wood, climb rocks, and laugh at her own mishaps. Or, if
she were city-pent, she needed to take some child to the Park and play
ball with it, and run as I saw an elegant girl dressed in velvet and
furs run through Madison Square one winter day with her little sister.
The nervous, capricious woman must be sent to swimming-school, or
learn to throw quoits or jump the rope, to wrestle or to sing. There
is nothing better for body and mind than learning to sing, with proper
method, under a teacher who knows how to direct the force of the voice,
to watch the strength, and expand the emotions at the same time. The
health of many women begins to improve from the time they study music.
Why? Because it furnishes an outlet for their feelings, and equally
because singing exerts the lungs and muscles of the chest which lie
inactive. The power for the highest as well as the lowest note is
supplied by the bellows of the lungs, worked by the mighty muscles of
the chest and sides. In this play the red blood goes to every tiny cell
that has been white and faint for want of its food; the engorged brain
and nervous centres where the blood has settled, heating and irritating
them, are relieved; the head feels bright, the hands grow warm, the
eyes clear, and the spirits lively. This is after singing strongly for
half an hour. The same effect is gained by any other kind of brisk work
that sets the lungs and muscles going, but as music brings emotion into
play, and is a pleasure or a relief as it is melancholy or gay, it is
preferable. The work that engages one’s interest as well as strength
is always the best. Per contra, whatever one does thoroughly and with
dispatch seldom continues distasteful. There is more than we see at a
glance in the command, “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with
thy might.” The reason given, because the time is short for all the
culture and all the good work we wish to accomplish, is the apparent
one; but the root of it lies in the necessities of our being. Only work
done with our might will satisfy our energies and keep their balance.
Half the women in the world are suffering from chronic unrest, morbid
ambitions, and disappointments that would flee like morning mist before
an hour of hearty, tiring work.
It is not so much matter what the work is, as how it is done.
The weak should take work up by degrees, working half an hour and
resting, then going at it steadily again. It is better to work a little
briskly and rest than to keep on the slow drag through the day. Learn
not only to do things well, but to do them quickly. It is disgraceful
to loiter and drone over one’s work. It is intolerable both in music
and in life.
The body, like all slaves, has the power to react on its task-master.
All mean passions appear born of diseased nerves. Was there ever a
jealous woman who did not have dyspepsia, or a high-tempered one
without a tendency to spinal irritation? Heathen tempers in young
people are a sign of wrong health, and mothers should send for
physician as well as priest to exorcise them. The great remedy for
temper is--sleep. No child that sleeps enough will be fretful; and the
same thing is nearly as true of children of larger growth. Not less
than eight hours is the measure of sleep for a healthy woman under
fifty. She may be able to get on with less, and do considerable work,
either with mind or hands. But she could do so much more, to better
satisfaction, by taking one or two hours more sleep, that she can not
afford to lose it. Women who use their brains--teachers, artists,
writers, and housewives (whose minds are as hard wrought in overseeing
a family as those of any one who works with pen or pencil)--need all
the sleep they can get. From ten to six, or, for those who do not
want to lose theatres and lectures altogether, from eleven to seven,
are hours not to be infringed upon by women who want clear heads and
steady tempers. What they gain by working at night they are sure to
lose next day, or the day after. It is impossible to put the case too
strongly. Unless one has taken a narcotic, and sleeps too long, one
should _never_ be awakened. The body rouses itself when its demands are
satisfied. A warm bath on going to bed is the best aid to sleep. People
often feel drowsy in the evening about eight or nine o’clock, but are
wide awake at eleven. They should heed the warning. The system needs
more rest than it gets, and is only able to keep up by drawing on its
reserve forces. Wakefulness beyond the proper time is a sign of ill
health as much as want of appetite at meals--it is a pity that people
are not as much alarmed by it. The brain is a more delicate organ than
the stomach, and nothing so surely disorders it as want of sleep.
In trouble or sorrow, light sedatives should be employed, like red
lavender or the bromate of potassa, for the nerves have more to bear,
and need all the rest they can get. The warm bath, I repeat, is better
than either.
Sunshine, music, work, and sleep are the great medicines for women.
They need more sleep than men, for they are not so strong, and their
nerves perhaps are more acute. Work is the best cure for ennui and for
grief. Let them sing, whether of love, longing, or sorrow, pouring out
their hearts, till the love returns into their own bosoms, till the
longing has spent its force, or till the sorrow has lifted itself into
the sunshine, and taken the hue of trust, not of despair.
CHAPTER XXV.
Changing Wigs and Chignons.--Matching Braids.--Frizzing the
Hair.--Crimping-pins.--Blonde Hair-pins.--What Colors
Hair.--Bleaching Tresses.--Sulphur Paste.--Foxy Locks.--Freshening
Switches.
The secret of content for most women is not perfection, but change.
They can not even be satisfied with their looks long at a time; but
Mary, Queen of Hearts as well as Scots, must draw an auburn wig
over her luxurious tresses, dark and smelling of violets, for which
regal-haired Elizabeth would have given the ruffs out of her best
gowns, and her recipe for yellow starch with them. The “pretty Miss
Vavasour,” who changed her chignon every morning with her costume,
was a type of the fickle beauties of the day, who are always better
satisfied with some other woman’s style than their own. Women of
intelligence send urgent requests for something to change the color of
their hair, either to make the front locks match the châtelaine braid,
or to bleach it outright. Fair blondes, whose sunny locks have been
their pride, find with dismay that this infantile tinge, which makes a
woman look so young and charming, is deepening into mature ash-brown--a
shade with no prestige or attraction whatever. In their exact eyes it
is mortifying to wear a blonde braid several degrees lighter than the
crown tresses. These last are growing, and constantly change, while the
ends keep their early tinge. Very few light-haired people pass from
youth to middle age without such a change. But, unless the difference
is very startling, it may be made agreeable by skillfully dressing
the hair. Light or varied hair should be crimped or waved, when its
tints will appear like the play of light and shade. Contrary to all
writers on this point, I contend that crimping does not necessarily
injure the hair. If it is killed--pulled out by the roots, or broken by
frizzing--the blame is due to careless or ignorant dressing. My own
hair was dressed regularly twice or thrice a week with hot irons for
years, and it never grew so fast or was in such a satisfactory state.
It was thoroughly combed and brushed, kept clean by weekly washing,
and each time it went under the curling-tongs it came out moist and
stimulated by the heat. The reason was, the clever French coiffeur
knew his business, and never allowed the hot iron to come directly in
contact with the hair. Each lock was done up in papillotes, and then
pinched with irons as hot as could be without scorching. Stiff hair may
be trained to curl by long and patient treatment with hot irons, and
be all the better for it. The secret of safe hair-dressing is never to
pull the hair, never scorch, and always wrap a lock in paper before
applying the iron. Common round curling-irons and frizzing-tongs may
be safety used if thin Manilla paper is folded once around them. So
in crimping: the hair may be done up on stout crimping-pins held by
slides, or braided in and out of a loop of thick cord, a bit of thin
paper folded over the crimp, and the pinching-iron used with safety
every day, provided the hair is not pulled too tight in braiding it.
The country method, where friseur’s irons are unknown, is to lay the
head on a table, and set a hot smoothing-iron on the woven lock--an
awkward but efficient process. It is not good to put the hair up on
metal pins or hair-pins overnight for two reasons: the perspiration
of the head will rust the pins, insensibly, so that they will cut the
hair; and the contact of iron with the sulphurous gas given out by hair
during sleep tends to darken and render the color displeasing. Rubber
crimping-pins, fastened by a rubber catch, are a late invention, and a
great improvement. But a loop of thick elastic cord is better than any
thing. The hair is woven in and out as on a hair-pin, the elastic holds
it when the fingers are withdrawn, and it is pleasanter to sleep in
than half a dozen stiff pins. I know more than one piquant little lady
whose “naturally” waving tresses are the admiration of her friends by
this simple means; and as the process has gone on for years without
lessening the flow of ruffled hair, it must be conceded that crimping
does not always hurt it. Iron hair-pins hurt the head more than a
generation of friseurs. The latest accusation against them is that they
draw off the healthy electricity of the head; and to a generation which
complains of paralysis from using steel pens, and uses patent glass
insulators for the legs of its bedsteads, this will seem no frivolous
charge. The patent insulators are a fact. Their use is advised by
medical men for all neuralgic, rheumatic, and sleepless people, and
one of the largest glass firms in New York makes their manufacture a
specialty. The patent and perfect hair-pin is not yet invented. Rubber
pins are clumsy if harmless, but there are gilt hair-pins made of a
yellow composition metal which are pleasanter to use than common ones,
and very becoming in blonde hair. Dark-haired people must stick to the
rubber pins, or at least see that their black ones are well japanned,
so as not to cut their locks.
Now, to give an opinion about the change of hair, we must know
something of its nature, and what colors it. Wise men say that light
hair is owing to an abundance of sulphur in the system, and dark hair
to an excess of iron. So if we comb light or red locks with lead combs
for a long time, the lead acts on the sulphureted hydrogen evolved by
the hair, and darkens it. If we can neutralize the iron in any way, a
contrary effect will be obtained. To do this, work at the dark hair
precisely as if it were an ink-spot to be taken out. The skin should
not suffer, and to prevent this, oil it carefully along the parting,
edges, and crown of the head, wiping the oil from the hair with a soft
cloth. Oxalic acid, strong and hot, is the best thing to take out spots
of ink made with iron, and we may try this with the hair. To apply
this, or any of the preparations named, one should be in undress,
wearing not a single article whose destruction would be of account,
for all the acids and bleaching powders used ruin clothes if a drop
touch them, taking the color out, and eating holes in the stoutest
fabrics. The eyelids and brows should be well oiled to prevent the acid
from attacking them, and the hands, shoulders, and face will be the
better for similar protection. On one ounce of pure, strong oxalic acid
pour one pint of boiling water, and, as soon as the hands can bear it,
wet the head with a sponge, not sapping it, but moistening thoroughly.
The effect may be hastened by holding the head in strong sunlight, or
over a register, or the steam of boiling water. Five minutes ought to
show a decided change, but if it do not, wet again and again, allowing
the acid to remain as long as it does not eat the skin. This may not be
hard to bear, but it will make the hair fall out.
Another mode is to cover the hair with a paste of powdered sulphur
and water, and sit in the sun with it for several hours. The Venetian
ladies used to steep their tresses in caustic solutions, and sit in
their balconies in the sun all day, bleaching it; and yet another day,
that the same rays might turn it yellow. Perhaps they gained by their
folly in one way what they lost in another, for such an airing and
sunning would benefit the health of any woman. A paste of bisulphate of
magnesia and lime is very effectual for bleaching the hair; but it must
be used with great caution not to burn hair, skin, and brains together.
The moment it begins seriously to attack the skin it should be washed
off in three waters, with lemon juice or vinegar in the last one to
neutralize the alkali. These pastes are recommended to turn ash-colored
hair light. To bleach dark hair is a long and tedious process, and
such an utter piece of foolery that I do not care to recount the
directions for it. The desire to change the color of the hair can only
be justified when it is of a dull and sickly appearance, and this is
best mended by improving the general health. Hair can not be glossy,
rich-colored, and thick unless the bodily vigor is what it should
be. Indeed, hair is one of the surest indexes to the state of health.
Scorched and foxy locks are a sign of neglect and of bad secretions.
Brushing remedies the first condition, hygiene the next. But among
the varieties of treatment specially appropriate to restoration of
the hair, sulphur vapor-baths must once more be mentioned. Doses of
sulphur, taken in Dotheboys’ fashion weekly, with molasses, will be
of service in keeping the blood pure, and in time will affect the
hair; but this powerful agent should not be used without advice of a
physician, and the dose should be always followed by simple purgatives,
like mustard-seed, figs, or prunes, eaten freely. Chlorines and
chlorides are specifics for bleaching hair, but they turn it gray or
white, and the yellow tinge is dyed afterward. Sulphurous applications
are the safest, if common caution is used not to take cold afterward or
to breathe any fumes from them.
Switches that have lost freshness may be very much improved by dipping
them into common ammonia without dilution. Half a pint is enough for
the purpose. The life and color of the hair is revived as if it were
just cut from the head. This dipping should be repeated once in three
months, to free the switch from dust, as well as to insure safety from
parasitic formations. The subject of coloring the hair will be spoken
of in another chapter.
CHAPTER XXVI.
Hair and Complexion.--Black Dyes.--Persian Blue-Black.--Peroxide of
Hydrogen.--Chloride of Gold.--Transient Dyes.
If it were easy to change the color of one’s hair, and possible to fix
that change, which it is not, the result in most cases would be far
from desirable. Nature tints hair and complexion in harmony with each
other, and both should be deepened if one is altered. Human pictures
as well as canvas would often be improved by bringing out the colors,
but the free hand of Health, that divine artist, is the only one whose
work is tolerable or enduring. In health this harmony of tint is varied
and delicate, ranging from the rose-and-snow complexions that suit the
true _blonde dorée_, the translucent honeysuckle-pink that sets off
red-brown, blue-black, and olive-brown hair with decided warmth of
cheeks, or purple-black reflets of the tresses with Spanish crimson,
or rather the burning rose of tropic blood seen through smooth skin.
Occasionally there comes an exciting discord, a minor strain of color
that affects one like subtle music, such as the finding of dark eyes
and golden hair, or clear, brilliant blue eyes in a gypsy face; but it
is impossible to compose heads in reality with any satisfying results
as yet. We have yet to learn how to work from the inside out, which is
the only true method with human modeling.
All that can be said on this point, however, will not make the
red-haired girl one whit less ardent in her desire to see her locks
of darker shade, that they may be less conspicuous, or keep the
dark-haired woman from the coveted vision of bright locks and black
eyes. It is useless to talk about the dangers of the process, or
hint that orpiment and realgar are deadly poisons. If every hair had
to turn into a living snake while undergoing the change, it would
hardly daunt this courageous vanity. The best to be hoped from any
farther enlightenment is that they will renounce these active poisons
for something comparatively harmless. _Du reste_, all readers will
be interested in the secrets of the toilet, and the sight of science
turned coiffeur.
It is comparatively a simple matter to dye hair black. Sulphur is one
of the constituents of hair, which exhales it constantly in the form
of sulphureted hydrogen, fortunately of the weakest sort, or it would
be intolerable. When wet with a solution of certain metals, the action
of this gas turns the hair black. Lead combs owe their efficiency to
this cause. The lead which rubs on the hair is darkened by the gas,
but the trace of lead at each combing is so slight that the operation
must be many times repeated before it takes effect. But lead-coloring,
whether applied by combs or by the paste of litharge, is a slow poison,
not seldom causing paralysis, and even death. The absorption of lead
into the system at any part is dangerous, but trebly so when applied
so closely to the brain. The tint given by this means, as well as that
dyed with nitrate of silver, is unnatural, greenish, and rusty in the
light, needing continual repetition to appear decent.
Orientals are in the habit of dyeing their hair and beards the deep
jetty black which they admire, if nature have not given them the
desired depth of color. For this purpose Turks and Egyptians use a
thick solution of native iron ore in pyrogallic acid, which gives the
blackest and most unimpeachable color. The Persians prefer blue-black,
and use indigo to produce it. European hair-dyers use a solution of
iron, with hydrosulphate of ammonia to develop and fix the color, but
the odor is objectionable. Dyes need to be applied once a week to
keep the color vivid, and it is well to touch the partings twice as
often with a fine comb dipped in the dye, as the hair always shows the
natural color as fast as it grows from the roots.
Red and flaxen hair is changed to gold with little trouble, but dark
hair must be bleached with chlorine before the desired tinge is given.
The bleaching is the most difficult part of the work. Solutions sold
for the purpose oftenest consist of peroxide of hydrogen--a somewhat
costly liquid, I am told. Solution of sulphurous acid will also bleach
hair; so will solutions of bisulphide of magnesia and of lime. The
hair, properly faded or whitened, is colored yellow with solutions of
cadmium, arsenic, or gold, but the cause of the change is the same
that produces black dye. The reaction of sulphureted hydrogen on
silver or lead turns things black, but on the metals first named turns
them yellow. Arsenic in the shape of orpiment or realgar, two deadly
poisons, is the base of most golden hair-dyes, and numerous cases of
poisoning have resulted from their use. Cadmium is harmless, and yields
quite as brilliant a tinge as arsenic, though less used. Chloride of
gold dyes a very satisfactory brown, available for eyebrows, lashes,
and whiskers. It must be used with exceeding care, however, for it
stains the skin as well as the hair. If applied with a fine-tooth
comb dipped in the liquid, combing the ends first, and ceasing just
before the skin is reached, the dye will probably “take” by means of
capillary attraction, without affecting the face. Cautious use of this
preparation on the brows and lashes gives very pleasing results when
these are much paler than the hair. They should be first carefully
oiled, and the oil wiped off the hair, which is then touched with a
fine sable pencil.
Fortunately, bleaching and dyeing are both such tedious processes that
this circumstance alone will keep many persons from submitting to
their bondage. Once applied, the dye becomes a necessity, much harder
to leave off than to begin, as the English Dr. Scoffern says, who is
authority for most suggestions in this chapter. One can not blame those
persons who brush the roots of the hair or forehead and neck with amber
lavender to disguise their pale, unsightly appearance, and a touch of
the same liquid on white eyebrows does no harm. Walnut bark, steeped
a week in Cologne, gives a dye that is transient, but easily applied
with a brush each day, and has instant effect. It takes a day or two to
bleach hair, and hours to color it either black or yellow; and the work
has to be done over month by month in a fashion that brings the victim
to speedy repentance of her folly.
INDEX.
Acid, Sulphurous, page 85.
Age, Devices of Uneasy, 212.
Amateur Hair-dressers, 89.
Appearance, how to Improve your Personal, 96.
Arabian Women Perfume themselves, how, 131.
Arms--
Whitening the, 64;
a Paste for Arms and Shoulders, 90;
how to Whiten the, 112;
a Paste for Whitening the, 128;
Exercise to Develop the, 231.
Artists, Woman’s, 87, 88.
Authors Eat, how, 102.
Awakened, Persons should not be, 255.
Awkward, when Girls are, 227.
Balconies and Parks, in, 98.
Banting System for Reducing Flesh, 175;
a Quaint Author, 176.
Bath--
Towels, 54;
Diana of Poitiers’, 71;
Sun, 97;
the Vapor, 129, 170;
Sulphur Vapor, 130;
Tepid, 152;
a Bath is an Extra at a Hotel, 168;
Sulphur, 170;
the Bran, 171;
the Russian Vapor, 205, 206, 207;
Sensations after a Russian, 208;
the Sitz, 230;
a Hot Soap-suds, 241;
a Sponge, 241;
a Warm Bath Good for the Nerves, 256.
Bathe, how Often we should, 171.
Bathing--
the Value of Hot, 54;
Magic Influence of, 89;
Bathing-Powder, 94;
Directions for, 159;
Experiments in Sulphur, 199;
Influence of, on Nerves and Passions, 209;
Bathing for Girls, 227.
Baths--
Sun, 20;
a Substitute for Sea, 55;
Fashionable, 87;
Public, 129, 201;
a Substitute for Vapor, 170;
Turkish Baths for Corpulency, 178;
Sulphur, 198;
Cautions about Sulphur Vapor, 200;
the Time to take Sulphur, 200;
Prices of Sulphur, 201;
how to take Sulphur, 202;
Hot Baths for Hot Weather, 203;
Russian Baths at Home, 204;
what Public Baths are, 205;
what Baths should be, 205;
Improvements Needed in Public, 205;
for Drunkards, 210.
Bay Rum for the Face, 172.
Bazin’s Pâte, 160.
Beauty--
the Worth of, 71;
Care of Personal, 72;
Beauty in the Human Form, 86;
Literature of, 136.
Bed, Time to go to, 255.
Beer, Root, 93.
Belle, a, must Row, Swim, Skate, and Ride, 224.
Belles of our Cities, Old, 149.
Bites of Insects on Children, 81.
Blackboards, 230.
Bleached by the Dawn, 97.
Blonde Hair, how to Make, 68;
Blonde Hair-pins, 261.
Blondes, Advice to, 20.
Blood, Mild Cider for Irritable, 240;
Dew-cool Air as a Blood Tonic, 97.
Bloom--
Almond, 65;
Decay of, 146.
Body, Nobility of the, 165.
Bonaparte, Princess Pauline--her Lovely Foot, 162.
Braces, 230;
Shoulder Braces, 38.
Braids, Matching, 258.
Brain--
Brain-work takes Food, 102;
the Brain Dependent on the Body, 167;
the Brain more Delicate than the Stomach, 256.
Bread, True, 99, 100.
Breakfasts, 98;
Christiana’s Breakfast, 98.
Breath--
an Offensive, 55;
how to Secure a Fragrant, 56.
Bust--
Development of the, 233;
Improving the, 234.
Calisthenics, 38.
Camphor for the Face, 172.
Carriage of Southern Women, 44.
Cascarilla Powder, 74.
Caution, a Needed, 235.
Cazenave’s, Dr., Composition for the Face, 73.
Celnart’s, Madame, Works of the Toilet, 134;
Recipe for Removing all Traces of Tobacco in the Breath, 156.
Chignons and Wigs, Changing, 257.
Chilblains, a Relief for, 190.
Children--
their Irritations, 121;
their Ways, 248, 249.
Chilliness is a Symptom of Diseases, 51.
Chills are Incipient Congestion, 52.
Christiana’s Looks, 96;
her Breakfast, 98.
Cider, Mild, for Irritable Blood, 240.
Cigars, People who Smoke too Many, 248.
Circulation, Charm of, 51.
Cleanliness means Health, 164.
Clergymen, Sensations of, 250.
Clothing, Paper, 52.
Coiffure, Arts of the, 138.
Cold Cream, 84.
Cologne, how to Make, 58.
Color, how to Procure Freshness of, 60.
Comedones, or Black Worms, how to Remove, 75.
Complexion--
how to Acquire a Clear, 13;
to Clear the, 17;
Preparations for Oily, 19;
how to Procure a Fine, 21;
Danger of Painting the, 69;
Rain-water as a Bath for the, 71;
Best Wash for the, 74;
Cure for Bad Effects of Sun and Wind on the, 80;
the Complexion Ruined by Fumes of Medicine, 85;
Iris Hues of the, 92;
what Complexion is the Sign of, 96:
Early Walks Improve the, 97;
Effect of Sunshine on the, 98;
Complexions Improved by Taking Sulphur Vapor-Baths, 130;
about Complexions, 192;
Complexion gives Trouble to Full-blooded Girls, 193;
Pure Blood Makes a Good, 199;
how to Dress with a Dull, 215;
Girls’ Complexions, 231;
Trouble with the Complexion in Cold Weather, 238;
how to Impart a Brilliant, 245;
the, 267.
Composers, a Nervous Opinion of, 248.
Congestions, Vapor-Bath Good for, 170.
Cooking, Proper, 99.
Corns--
Loose Shoes the Cause of, 190;
Soft, 191;
Remedies for, 191.
Corpulence, Danger of, 182.
Corpulency, Trials of, 177;
Turkish Baths for, 178.
Corsets--
about, 105;
Girdles more Needed than, 105;
Singing Scales with Corsets off, 232;
the Best, 233.
Cosmetic--
Artist, 87;
Gloves, 89, 245;
Cosmetic, 140;
Sultana’s, 144;
Milk of Roses as a, 153;
Cosmetics sometimes play Tricks, 194.
Crimping--
the Art of, 83;
does not Injure the Hair, 258;
Crimping-pins, 259;
Rubber Crimping-pins, 260.
Curl the Hair, how to, 84;
Curling Fluid, 28;
Curling-irons, 259.
Custom, 98.
Cuts, 80.
Dancers Eat, how, 102.
Dancing, 243.
Daughter’s Dressing, a Mother should Inspect her, 226.
Dawn, Bleached by the, 97.
Dentifrice--
Delicate, 57;
Standard, 143.
Depilatories, 32;
Cautions about, 128, 129.
Devices of Uneasy Age, 212.
Devonshire, Duchess of, 149.
Diet--
for Persons with Hepatic Spots, 173;
for Stout People, 180;
for Girls, 228.
Digestion, Food for Weak, 14.
Diseases--
Chilliness is a Symptom of, 51;
Eruptive, 80.
Dress--
how to, 219;
Poor Taste in, 220;
for Girls, 228;
for Flat Figures, 234.
Dresses for Girls, 233.
Dressing on Two Hundred a Year, 215.
Drinks--
Cooling, 20;
Summer, 92, 93.
Drowsy, go to Bed when you feel, 255.
Dwellings, about our, 209.
Dye--
a Harmless, 91;
how to Apply, 91;
French, 91;
Persian Blue-black, 270;
for White Eyebrows, 273.
Dyes--
for the Hair, 29;
for the Eyelashes and Eyebrows, 30;
for Theatricals, 34;
Chloride of Gold, 271;
Transient, 273.
Dyspepsia, Jealous Women have, 254.
Eat, how to, 102.
“Eau Angelique,” 157.
Editors, Sensations of, 250.
Eliot, George, on Complexions, 73.
Emotion, Training of, 151.
Enamel, Baking, 145.
Enigma of Love, the, 147.
Exercise--
to Develop the Arms, 231;
for Girls, 232;
Out-door, 251.
Expression is the Sign of, what, 95.
Eyebrows--
how to Grow, 90;
a Dye for White, 273.
Eyelashes and Eyebrows--
Dyeing the, 30;
Washes for, 34;
Trimmed and Brushed, 88;
how to Grow, 91.
Eyes Bright, Eating Sugar with Cologne on Makes the, 245.
Eyes, Dark, 122.
Face--
Means of Softening the, 19;
Making-up the, 61;
Compositions for the, 73;
Olive-oil and Tar for the, 120;
a Preparation for Whitening the, 145;
Pastes and Poultices for the, 172.
Faces--
Good for Irritable, 120;
Bleaching, 198;
Dull, Thin, 218;
School-girls’ Flushed, 243.
Faults, Common, 96.
Feelings, never Talk of a Girl’s, before Her, 230.
Feet--
Care of the, 40, 162;
Position of, when Standing, 40;
how to Keep the Feet Elastic, 42;
Painful Swelling of, 42;
how to Bathe the, 162;
Oil for the, 163.
Figure--
Erectness of the, 38;
the Proper Carriage of the, when Walking, 42;
what a Fine Figure must be, 225;
Care of the, after Nursing, 236.
Figures, Flat, 234.
Fine Arts, School of, 110.
Finger Thimbles, 124.
Finger-tips, Coloring of the, 66.
Flesh--
how to Reduce, 93;
Banting System for Reducing, 175;
Losing Flesh at the Rate of a Pound a Week, 182.
Folks, Older, to Join with the Children, 249.
Food--
for Weak Digestion, 14;
Brain-work takes, 102;
about our, 209.
Form--
Renovating the Outward, 12;
Beauty in the Human, 86.
Freckles--
Golden, 78;
how to Remove, 79.
Freckle Wash, 114.
French Dye, 91.
Frizzing the Hair, 259.
Frizzing-tongs, 259.
Gargle for the Mouth, 157.
Generation, a Low-toned, 247.
Girdle, a Linen, 105.
Girdles more Needed than Corsets, 105.
Girls--
Physical Education of, 224;
when Girls are Awkward, 227;
Bathing for, 227;
Diet for, 228;
Dress for, 228;
Exercise for, 232;
Care of Young, 235;
Delicacy due Young, 235.
Gloves, Cosmetic, 89;
Close-fitting, 243.
Grace--
the Secret of, 38;
how to Inspire a Girl with, 226;
in Women, Sign of, 234.
Gums, a Recipe for Diseased, 160.
Hair--
Black, how to Dye, 13;
Care of the, 22;
how to Cultivate Children’s, 23;
Washes, 24;
Means of Obtaining Luxuriant, 26;
when to Cut, 26;
German Method of Treating the, 27;
Curling Fluid for the, 28;
Oil for the, 28;
Dyes, 29, 189;
how to Treat Red, 31;
Superfluous, 32;
Growth of, 33;
how to Brush the, 33;
Hair Powders, 67;
to Darken the, 68;
how to make Blonde, 68;
Fashionable Gray, 82;
Preparation for Preventing the Sea-air from Turning the Hair
Gray, 82;
Preparation for Restoring the Color of the, 82;
how to keep Hair Crimped or Curled, 83;
how to Curl the, 84;
Bather, 87;
Dressers, Amateur, 89;
a Wash to Stimulate the Growth of, 90;
Bleaching, 121, 263;
Removal of Hair on the Face, 125;
Removal of Superfluous, 125;
a Paste for Removing Hairs from the Face, 127;
Countries where Women have the Finest, 132;
Effect of the Sun on the, 138;
Burdock Wash for the, 186;
how to keep, from Coming Out, 187;
how to Restore Color to the, 188;
Dye, Cheapest and most Harmless, 189;
Restorer, Sperm-oil a, 189;
Hay-colored, 221;
how to Dress the, 221;
False, 257;
Changing the Color of the, 258;
Crimping does not Injure the, 258;
Light, should be Crimped, 258;
Dead, should be Pulled Out by the Roots, 258;
Frizzing the, 259;
Hair-pins, Blonde, 261;
Iron Hair-pins Hurt the Head, 261;
Cause of Light, 262;
what Colors, 262;
Foxy, 265;
how to Change Red and Flaxen, 271.
Hands, how to Soften the, 111, 243;
how to Whiten the, 112;
Bran Mittens for Whitening the, 172;
how to Secure Good, for Girls, 231;
Trouble with the, in Cold Weather, 238;
School-girls’ Flushed, 243;
for Removing Vegetable Stains from the, 244.
Harvey, Mr. William, 180;
Honors to Dr., 184.
Health, Cleanliness means, 164.
Heart Dependent on the Body, the, 167.
Hepatic Spots, Remedies for, 173.
High Living, Effects of, 125.
Homely Women, Hope for, 95.
Hours of Solitude, Reserve our, 149.
Hugo says, what Victor, 109.
Humors to the Surface, Drawing, 196.
Infant, do not Wash an, with Cheap Soap, 161.
Ink or Vegetable Stains, how to Remove, 112.
Insulators, Patent, 261.
Iris, Florentine, 138.
Italian Ladies, Habit of, 75.
Joints, to Restore Suppleness to the, 153.
Lacing, Arts of, 136.
Leaves are Full of Joy, 165.
Lecturers Eat, how, 102.
Linen, Écru, and White Nansook, 217.
Lip-Salve, 114.
Lips, Color for the, 67.
Looks, Woman’s, 247.
Love--
the Enigma of, 147;
the Love of Man, 147;
to Love and be Loved, 147;
Power of, over Man, 147;
Effect of, on Women, 148;
Miracle of, 148.
Madness, Brief, 249.
Magnificent, Easier to be, than Clean, 168.
“Making-up,” the Secrets of, 244.
Malmaison, Josephine of, 150.
Man Admires in Woman, what, 225.
Manners, Education in, 35.
Medicines for Women, the Great--Sunshine, Music, Work, and Sleep, 256.
Milk of Roses, 66, 153.
Mirrors, Advantages of Lining Rooms with, 221.
Moles, 33.
Montagu, Lady Mary, 75.
Montez, Lola, Recipe of, 154.
Mother, a, should Inspect her Daughter’s Dressing, 226.
Mothers--
a Word to, 109;
Prescription for Feeble, 211.
Mouth, Gargle for the, 157.
Murray’s Book, Lines from, 196.
Music--
Influence of, 148;
Women should Study, 252.
Musquito Bites, 81.
Nails--
Polishing the, 88;
how to give a Fine Color to the, 112;
Ingrowing, 163.
Nansook, White, 212.
Neck, a Preparation for Whitening the, 145.
Needle, how to hold a, Gracefully, 137.
Neighbors, Pulling our, to Pieces, 96.
Nerves, Woman’s, 247.
Nervous Prostration, Cure for, 13;
Nervous and Sanguine People, Diet for, 15.
Nets _vs._ Night-Caps, 25.
Neuralgia, Sulphur Vapor-Bath for, 130, 170.
Nose, Redness of the, 244.
Nose-Machine, a, 123.
Nursing, Care of the Figure after, 236.
Oil--
for the Hair, 28;
of Mace, 187.
Oils, Sweet, 153.
Ointment, Olive, 195.
Olive-Oil and Tar for the Face, 120.
Out-door Exercise, 251.
Padding, against, 233.
Paint and Powder, 59.
Painting the Complexion, Danger of, 69.
Paleness, Northern and Southern, 78.
Pallor, Shining, 77.
Paper as a Preventative against Chilliness, 52.
Parks and Balconies, in, 98.
Parties, Preparing for, 238.
Passions, how to Quiet our, 20.
Paste--
for Shoulders and Arms, 90;
for Removing Hairs from the Face, 127;
for Whitening the Arms, 128;
of Venus, 139;
Sulphur, 263.
Pastilles, Gray, for Purifying the Breath, 156.
Pàte, Bazin’s, 160.
Perfume--
of the Presence, 49;
how Arabian Women Perfume themselves, 131;
Perfumes, 141;
for the Body, 142;
Lost, 143;
of Spring, 149;
of the Bath, 159.
Perspiration--
Preparation for Profuse, 93;
Cure for Odor of the, 159;
Dangers Resulting from Suddenly Checking, 203.
Petrarch’s Laura, 88.
Physical Culture Urgent, 167.
Physical Education of Girls, 224.
Piano, Practice at the, 229.
Pimples--
a Recipe to Remove, 74;
are Disease, 239.
Pimple-Wash, 114.
Pomades, 25;
Southernwood, 29;
Almond, 84;
Mexican, 141.
Powder, 62;
Chalk, 63;
Cascarilla, 74, 242;
Bathing, 94.
Powder and Paint, 59.
Preparation for Profuse Perspiration, 93.
Presence, Perfume of the, 49.
Prime, Woman’s, 11.
Principals of Schools, a Word to, 109.
Prophylactic Fluid, 241.
Prostration, Cure for Nervous, 13.
Queen of England, the, uses Distilled Water for her Toilet, 169.
Races--
Grace of the Latin, 37;
Antique, 226.
Récamier’s Training, 70.
Recipes--
for Warm Days, 92;
Perfume, 139, 140, 141, 142.
Rheumatism, Good for, 170.
Rooms, Advantages of Lining, with Mirrors, 221.
Roses, Milk of, 66.
Rouge--
Tints of, 64;
Devoux French, 66.
Rusma, Oriental, 138.
Sallowness, how to Remove, 92.
Salve--
Lip, 114;
Toilet, 114.
Scalp, Preparations for Dry, 25.
Scrofulous Affections, Good for, 201.
Sea-Baths, a Substitute for, 55.
Shoe-Lining, 164.
Shoes, Tight, 41.
Shoulder--
Braces, 38;
how to Acquire Sloping Shoulders, 40;
a Paste for Arms and Shoulders, 90;
Device for Stiff Shoulders, 103.
Singers and Students, Diet for, 15;
how Singers Eat, 102;
Training of, 151;
Singing Scales with Corsets off, 232;
Singing, 251.
Situation, Accepting the, 214.
Skin--
Irritations of the, 20;
Prescription for the, 79;
Cure for Rough Skins from Yachting, 79;
Rough, 80;
Summer Irritations of the, 81;
Inflammation of the, 85;
for Improving the, 113;
how to Prolong the Freshness of the, 152;
Bran Cleanses the, 171;
a Recipe for Sunburned and Freckled, 192;
Cause of Rough, 193;
Effect of Consumption on the, 195.
Sleep--
the Remedy for Temper, 254;
Number of Hours to, 254;
People who Need Much, 255.
Soaps--
Quality of, 160;
do not use Cheap, 161;
Carbolic, 238.
Solitude, Reserve our Hours of, 149.
Southern Women, Carriage of, 44.
Southernwood Pomade, 29.
Spirits, how to Obtain Unfailing, 101.
Stains, how to Remove Ink or Vegetable, 112.
Still, a Small, 169.
Stippled Skin, Cure for, 18.
Stockings, how Often to Change, 163.
Stomach, to Maintain a Healthy Condition of the, 18.
Stout and Thin People, Food for, 16;
a Hint to Stout People, 93;
why People Grow Stout, 102.
Study, a Veto on Close, 229.
Superfluous Hair, 32.
Surgeon, a Wise, 180.
Swimming-School, Nervous Women should go to, 251.
Switches, Freshening, 265.
Tan-Wash, 114.
Tar, 195.
Tea, People who Drink Strong, 248.
Teeth--
for Decaying, 56;
Cleansing of the, 57;
Wash for the, 143.
Temper, how to Soothe the, 209;
Sleep the Remedy for, 254;
Heathen Tempers a Sign of Wrong Health, 254.
Theatricals, Dyes for, 34.
Thin and Stout People, Food for, 16.
Tint, a Brown, 91.
Tobacco in the Breath, Remedy for, 156.
Toilet--
Water, 58, 140;
Antique Toilet Arts, 60;
the Toilet a Profession, 87;
Influence of a Luxurious, 88;
Luxury of the, 88;
Artistic at the, 116;
Cares of the, 136;
Craft of the, 152;
Toilet Waters and Pastes, 161;
Distilled Water for the, 169;
Plain Women and Agreeable, 215.
Toothache, Recipe for the, 155.
Tooth-Wash, 158.
Towels, Bath, 54.
Training, Récamier’s, 70.
Tweezers, Roman, 126.
Typhoid Fever sometimes Caused by High Living, 126.
Ulcers, 80.
Unfeminine Traits, 108.
Vanities, Different, 109.
Vestris, Madame, 152.
Vitriol, Wash of, 76.
Wakefulness a Sign of Ill-Health, 255.
Walking in Relation to Health, 46.
Warm Days, Recipes for, 92.
Wash--
of Vitriol, 76;
to Stimulate the Growth of Hair, 90;
a Sand, 111;
for Tan, Freckles, Pimples, and Blotches, 114;
for Teeth or Hands, 143;
for Sunburned Skin, 242;
Glycerine, 242.
Water--
Toilet, 58, 140;
Distilling 168;
Distilled Water for the Toilet, 169.
Weak, how the, should Work, 253.
Wife, a Senator’s, 218.
Wigs, Blonde, for Theatricals, 68;
Wigs and Chignons, Changing, 257.
Willis, N. P., on Beauty, 48.
Woman--
her Business to be Beautiful, 9;
Woman’s Artists, 87, 88;
a Healthy Woman, 107;
the Loveliest Woman of France, 150;
Trials of a Plain, 185;
how a Homely Woman can make Herself Agreeable, 215;
what Man Admires in a, 225;
Woman’s Value in the World, 225;
a Woman’s Rule, 240;
Woman’s Looks and Nerves, 247.
Women--
Carriage of Southern, 44;
Hope for Homely, 95;
Transformation of Homely Women into Charming Beings, 95;
Sorrows of Ugly, 110;
Effect of Being in Love on, 148;
at and after Thirty, 150;
Counsel to Women of Thirty, 115;
Porcelain, 196;
what is to be Done with Weak, 196;
Plain Women and Agreeable Toilets, 215;
Sensations of Writing, 250;
Nervous Women should go to Swimming-School, 251;
why Women should Study Music, 252;
Jealous Women have Dyspepsia, 254;
why Women Need more Sleep than Men, 256;
the Secret of Content for most, 257.
Work--
a Nervous Person’s, is Fuss, 248;
how the Weak should, 253;
well done the Easiest, 253.
Worms--
Black, or Comedones, how to Remove, 75;
Flesh, 239.
Wrinkles--
a Kind of Varnish for, 75;
how to Ward off, 152;
Bread Paste and Court-Plaster to Conceal, 213.
THE END.
[Illustration]
* * * * *
Transcriber’s note
Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Page number references in the index are as published in the original
publication and have not been checked for accuracy in this eBook.
Other spelling has also been retained as originally published except
for the changes below.
Page 93: “of sassafras drank” “of sassafras drunk”
Page 121: “for _trés blondes_” “for _très blondes_”
Page 125: “CHAPTER XI .” “CHAPTER XII.”
Page 192: “A southern lady” “A Southern lady”
Page 217: “its semi-tranparency” “its semi-transparency”
Page 277: “Washes for, ;” “Washes for, 34;”
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