By "THE NEW DOCTOR."
PART I.
THE COMPLEXION.
It has been stated in the papers lately that the Amsterdam physician to the poor, late Empress of Austria did much by his prescriptions to maintain the beauty of that most beautiful and accomplished lady. And yet the Empress was by no means a vain woman, and this is proved by the fact that, now she is gone, there has been no photograph of her taken these twenty years.
I thought that I might state as an axiom that beauty is impossible without a fair amount of health. That for instance, a beautiful complexion was incompatible with a very serious disease. But I find that here I am mistaken. "I want a complexion like a girl in a decline," a woman said to me the other day. I wonder if she had ever seen a girl in "a decline." To me the dull purple cheeks and lips of advanced consumption are most ghastly. Other women strive after a dead white face, and poison themselves with arsenic to try to obtain it.
The beautiful shades of red and white which are admired by most persons are, however, impossible without good health. Late hours, indigestion, lack of exercise and the use of cosmetics will destroy a good complexion, and when once it has gone it is by no means easy to regain.
Of course I do not know, but I strongly suspect that every girl who has a good complexion is too careful of her appearance to need any of the crude hints that I can give to her less favoured sisters about improving their complexions.
The best complexions to be found are not in the drawing-rooms of Mayfair but in the slums of Whitechapel. Many dirty little ragamuffins have far finer complexions than any of the leaders of fashion. This is sufficient proof that soap and water are not the causes of a fine cheek. Rather is it the outdoor life, the not too liberal diet, the absence of stimulants, the early hours and the loose clothing of the urchin that give her her good complexion.
All soap used for washing the face should be of fine quality. You should never wash your face in very hot water. You should not go out in a wind without a veil, and you should never lace tightly if you wish to have a good complexion. When the face gets rough, as it is apt to do after a walk in the wind, a very little glycerine and rosewater or glycerine and cucumber will help to keep the face clear and soft. Cosmetics are undoubtedly a fertile cause of the bad complexions so common among the upper middle classes, and though by no means all cosmetics are harmful, you should be very careful what you put on your face.