Confidential Chats with Girls

by William Lee Howard

This is the time when a girl commences to worry about her complexion. She frets and becomes anxious about the little spots appearing upon her face. If she has not the proper home advice, but hears all sorts of tales and sees all sorts of things in the school or shop, she soon resorts to the drug stores for a face lotion, powder or cream. She may have been told by an older girl that, “No, I never had anything but a good complexion; you’d better take something for yours, I would,” and much more of this kind of foolish advice.

Some girls go through the period of development without any marked change in their complexion; others, especially brunettes, will have a “broken-out-face,” a hot and oily skin and not infrequently pimples on some part of their bodies. Girls of nervous temperament are apt to have more or less of a spotted complexion during the first few years of menstruation. In all these girls it is more of a sign of good health than otherwise, and if the skin had been left alone,—which it has not, because you have never known the truth,—the quack advertisements of “face creams,” “skin food,” “complexion wafers,” and all the other skin poisons and complexion-destroyers, would never have been put out to swindle girls and women.

Pimples most frequently show on the shoulders and upper arms, and unless the girl knows that these really mean a splendid complexion when she has grown to full womanhood, she worries herself to a point that makes her little life miserable.

This is the point in a girl’s life where she starts in to ruin her complexion forever. She commences to fill in the openings made to let out the fatty and other substances in her skin, by powdering, applying some ointment which keeps these pores closed, or goes to bed with greasy or other injurious “skin foods” upon her face. In fact, she does just what in the end will give her a pasty complexion instead of a clear one. Of course she will later on take to the rouge and powder puffs and have to keep them in constant use until her skin becomes like that of a dried codfish.

Please remember that what you need during the first years of your menstrual life is to allow full freedom for the skin to get rid of all the material your state is producing behind the outer skin. This material must come away if the skin is to be a clear and healthy one. Banking up, stopping this sweating process of the glands of the body, will ruin your complexion in time. You would not attempt to clean a room by sweeping all the dust under the carpet and not expect this dust to be always flying up and making the room dusty and ill-smelling? But you do about the same thing when you do not let all the dirt and dust come away through the spring cleaning of the skin.

The period of your development is the Springtime of your life, and you must expect all kinds of disagreeable feelings and little annoyances to occur during this period.

Each month, just as your menses are coming on, you will find little pimples or some redness on your face, nose or shoulders; perhaps on the arms. You should not want to go to dances or entertainments at these times; in fact you should not; but at no time during your growth into full womanhood should you wear gowns with short sleeves and low necks. For even between the menstrual periods there will be some indications upon the face or skin which tell the story. To hide these little eruptions or redness of the skin you have to apply powder to the neck, shoulders and arms. What are the consequences? The perspiration, due to the heat of the room and the exercise of dancing, keeps the inflammation active under the powder and may cause such pimples that the scars are left forever.

And right here is where you “catch cold.” Drafts, sleeping by an open window or going from a warm room to a colder one do not give you a cold. You may catch cold by doing these things, but the cause is something which has brought about a too rapid loss of heat from the body; such as any wrong way of clothing or underclothing yourself; low-neck dresses for winter; or covering the skin with powder or enamel, through which the perspiration cannot have free play and keep the temperature of the body equal; these are the reasons you “catch cold.”

Those girls you occasionally see with a pitted skin on their faces and shoulders, are those who in all probability prevented the natural grease and other substances from getting out when they were in the first two or three years of their development. They have generally brought about this disagreeable complexion by attempting to dress as full-grown women and covering face, shoulders and backs with some kind of lotion, powder or cream.