The Colored Girl Beautiful.
Every colored girl would like to be beautiful. The so-called beauty is but skin deep. A burn, a scar, a disease, and beauty is fled, although contour and other evidences might remain.
One can not remove bad looks with soap and water. Youth should be and is always attractive. It is after twenty-five that one begins to wish that she had been more careful in her youth, that she had controlled her powers, and that she had cultivated her good points and removed her "Spots."
A girl should study herself, learn her powers, and she will get the real beauty if she will deliberately and persistently train for it.
We look at the photos of beautiful, smiling, round-faced children and then at the tired, many-lined unhappy faces into which they have changed. Women delight in showing us photos to prove how beautiful they were when they were sweet sixteen. As we look, it is hard to believe. However, the camera, they say, always tells the truth, and we have later evidence before us.
The inward tools, Thoughts, have carved the ugly pictures on faces. Ignorance is a terrible curse along all lines. Many have not learned the secret of preserving their bodies, along with other studies, yet the savage nations care for their bodies.
Girls abuse their bodies; they eat too much or else the wrong kind of food, causing indigestion or other stomach and liver troubles. There is no room for the distended digestive organs and gorged stomachs and if these walls are stretched too often they lose their elasticity and the digestive juices go on a strike, causing eruptions on the face and a bad complexion, besides other complications which destroy beauty. Then, too, coarse or highly seasoned foods arouse other appetites through the law of sympathy.
Girls do not heed the signs of colds and complications peculiar to women. Operations are often necessary because of exposure and neglect of colds. The clothing is often too tight and pressure causes malignant growth and great suffering in after years.
A girl should keep her face as clean as a man's face after shaving, and her body should be correspondingly clean, that the gases and odors may escape, lest they take revenge upon her face. A girl should no more offer a foul odor of body or mouth or nose, than she would offer poison.