Romantic Love and Personal Beauty / Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities

by Henry T. Finck

Health, Beauty, and Love—everywhere we see them inseparably associated. Who could ever fall in love with a pair of thin, pallid lips that have lost their pink and plump loveliness through anæmic indolence, or disease, or tight lacing? The very teeth, though the hardest substance of the body, lose their natural colour and beauty in ill-health. Not only do they decay and become blackish, but “in bilious people they become yellow, and in consumptive patients they show occasionally an unnaturally pearly and translucent whiteness” (Brinton and Napheys).

Negroes have, normally, teeth of a dazzling whiteness, which is often regarded as a racial peculiarity, but is due, according to Waitz, to the use of chalk or vegetal fibres. But various savages are dissatisfied with the natural form and colour of their teeth, and disfigure them in various ways. “In different countries the teeth are stained black, red, blue, etc., and in the Malay Archipelago it is thought shameful to have teeth like those of a dog” (Darwin).

“In Macassar the women spend a part of the day in painting their teeth red and yellow, in such a way that a red tooth follows a yellow one, and alternately.” In Japan, Fashion compels married women to blacken their teeth, not, however, as an ornament, but to make them ugly and save them from temptation.

Some African tribes knock out two or more of their front teeth, on the ground that they do not wish to look like brutes. The Batokas “think the presence of incisors most unsightly, and on beholding some Europeans, cried out, ‘Look at the great teeth!’... In various parts of Africa, and in the Malay Archipelago, the natives file the incisors into points like those of a saw, or pierce them with holes, into which they insert studs.”

In case of the lips, primitive Fashion prescribes still more atrocious mutilations. One would think that a negro’s swollen lips were ugly enough to suit even a devotee of African Fashion; but no! Her lips being naturally large, the fashionable negro belle considers it incumbent on her to exaggerate them into additional hideousness, just as European and American fashionable women exaggerate the slight and beautiful natural curve of their waist into the atrocious hour-glass shape.

“Among the Babines, who live north of the Columbia River,” says Sir John Lubbock, “the size of the under lip is the standard of female beauty. A hole is made in the under lip of the infant, in which a small bone is inserted; from time to time the bone is replaced by a larger one, until at last a piece of wood, three inches long and an inch and a half wide, is inserted in the orifice, which makes the lip protrude to a frightful extent. The process appears to be very painful.”

“In Central Africa,” says Darwin, “the women perforate the lower lip and wear a crystal, which, from the movement of the tongue, has ‘a wriggling motion, indescribably ludicrous during conversation.’ The wife of the chief of Latooka told Sir S. Baker that Lady Baker ‘would be much improved if she would extract her four front teeth from the lower jaw, and wear the long pointed polished crystal in her under lip.’ Further south, with the Makalolo, the upper lip is perforated, and a large metal and bamboo ring, called a pelelé, is worn in the hole. This caused the lip to project in one point two inches beyond the tip of the nose; and when the lady smiled, the contraction of the muscles elevated it over the eyes. ‘Why do the women wear these things?’ the venerable chief Chinsurdi was asked. Evidently surprised at such a stupid question, he replied, ‘For beauty! They are the only beautiful things women have; men have beards, women have none. What kind of a person would she be without a pelelé? She would not be a woman at all, with a mouth like a man but no beard.’”

In New Zealand, according to Tylor, “it was considered shameful for a woman not to have her mouth tattooed, for people would say with disgust, ‘She has red lips.’”

Compare these two pictures for a moment: on the one side, the protuberant mouth-borders of the negro woman, swollen as by disease or an insect’s sting, enlarged, in smiling, to the very ears, and showing not only the teeth but the gums, the tongue and the unæsthetic œsophagus; on the other side, the full but delicate cherry lips of civilised woman, capable of an infinite variety of subtle, graceful movements, a keyboard on which the whole gamut of human feelings finds expression, and revealing, in a smile, only the tips of the pearly, undeformed teeth. Shall we say, with Alison and Jeffrey, that it is all a matter of taste, and that the negro has as much right to his taste as we have to ours? Or have we not plentiful reasons for claiming that Personal Beauty is a fine art, and that the reason why the negro prefers his coarse mouth to our refined lips is because he does not understand our highly-developed and specialised Beauty?

There are cogent scientific reasons for believing that, just as the skull has been modified and developed from the upper part of the spinal column, and the brain from its contents, so the facial muscles are all developed from the broad muscle of the neck. In the orang, according to Professor Owen, we find already all the important facial muscles which man uses to express emotions. But, as Darwin remarks, “distinct uses, independently of expression, can ... be assigned with much probability for almost all the facial muscles.”