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

by Henry T. Finck

If a woman’s skin is so morbidly sensitive as to be injured by ordinary water and good soap, it is a sign of ill-health which calls for residence in the country and the mellowing rays of the sun. Where this is unattainable, the water may be medicated by the addition of a slice of lemon, cucumber, or horse-radish, to all of which magic effects are often attributed. The black spots on the sides of the nose may be removed in a few weeks by the daily application (with friction) of lemon juice. For pimples and barber’s itch a camphor and sulphur ointment, which may be obtained of any chemist, is the simplest remedy. For a shiny, polished complexion, and excessive redness of the nose, cheeks, and knuckles, the following mixture is recommended by a good authority:—Powdered borax, one half ounce; pure glycerine, one ounce; camphor-water, one quart. Borax, indeed, is as indispensable a toilet article as soap or a nail-brush. After washing the face, exposure to the raw air should always be avoided for ten or fifteen minutes.

“A certain amount of friction applied to the face daily will do much,” says Dr. Bulkley, “to keep the pores of the sebaceous glands open; and, by stimulating the face, to prevent the formation of the black specks and red spots so common in young people, I generally direct that the face be rubbed to a degree short of discomfort, and that the towel be not too rough.” Slight friction also helps to ward off wrinkles.

Two or three weekly baths—hot in winter, cold in summer—are absolutely necessary for those who wish to keep their skin in a healthy condition; and no elixir of youth and beauty could produce such a sparkling eye and glow of rosy health as a daily morning sponge bath, followed by friction—care being taken, in a cold room, to expose only one part of the body at a time. The importance of keeping open the pores of the skin by bathing is seen by the fact that if a man were painted with varnish he would suffocate in a few hours; for the skin is a sort of external lung, aiding its internal colleague in removing effete products, dissolved in the perspiration, from the system.

The debris and oily matter brought to the surface of the skin and deposited there by the perspiration cannot be completely removed without soap. Unfortunately, this article has done more to ruin complexions than almost any other cause, except smallpox and the superstitious dread of sunshine. Many people have a peculiar mania for economising in soap. If they can buy a piece of soap for a farthing, they consider themselves wonderfully clever, regardless of the fact that it may not only ruin their complexion, but produce a repulsive skin disease which it will cost much gold to cure. Do they ever realise that these soaps, which they thus smear over the most delicate parts of their body every day, are made of putrid carcasses of animals, rancid fat, and corrosive alkalies? Has no one ever told them that if a soap is both cheap and highly perfumed it is certain to be of vile composition, and injurious to the skin? After washing yourself wait a moment till the soap’s artificial odour has disappeared, and then smell your hands. That vile rancid odour which remains—if you knew its source, you would immediately run for a Turkish bath to wash off the very epidermis to which that odour has adhered.

What has ruined so many complexions is not soap itself, but bad soap. A famous specialist, Dr. Bulkley, says that “there is no intrinsic reason why soap should not be applied to the face, although there is a very common impression among the profession, as well as the laity, that it should not be used there.... The fact is, that many cases of eruptions upon the face are largely due to the fact that soap has not been used on that part; and it is also true that, if properly employed, and if the soap is good, it is not only harmless, but beneficial to the skin of the face, as to every other part of the body.”

“A word may be added in reference to the so-called ‘medicated soaps,’ whose number and variety are legion, each claiming virtues far excelling all others previously produced.... Now all or most of this attempt to ‘medicate’ soap is a perfect farce, a delusion, and a snare to entrap the unwary and uneducated.... Carbolic soap is useless and may be dangerous, because the carbolic acid may possibly become the blind beneath which a cheap, poor soap is used; for in all these advertised and patented nostrums the temptation is great to employ inferior articles that the pecuniary gain may be greater. The small amount of carbolic acid incorporated in the soap cannot act as an efficient disinfectant.”

FRECKLES AND SUNSHINE

Soap is not the only cosmetic that has been tabooed in the face because of illogical reasoning. There is a much more potent beautifying influence—viz., the mellowing rays of the sun—of which the face has long been deprived, chiefly on account of an unscientific prejudice that the sun is responsible for freckles. In his famous work on skin diseases Professor Hebra of Vienna, the greatest modern authority in his specialty, has completely disproved this almost universally accepted theory. The matter is of such extreme importance to Health and Beauty that his remarks must be quoted at length:—

"It is a fact that lentigo (freckles) neither appears in the newly-born nor in children under the age of 6-8 years, whether they run about the whole day in the open air and exposed to the bronzing influence of the sun, or whether they remain confined to the darkest room; it is therefore certain that neither light nor air nor warmth produces such spots in children....

“If we examine the skin of an individual who is said to be affected with the so-called freckles only in the summer, at other seasons of the year with sufficient closeness in a good light, and with the skin put on the stretch by the finger, we shall detect the same spots, of the same size but of somewhat lighter colour than in summer. In further illustration of what has just been said, I will mention that I have repeatedly had the opportunity of seeing lentigines on parts of the body that, as a rule, are never exposed to the influence of the light and sun....