Confidential Chats with Girls

by William Lee Howard

If this condition is found in the young woman, it is ninety-nine times out of a hundred her own fault, or due to her ignorance of what the scalp and hair need.

It is because she has piled a lot of dead and often diseased hair on top of her healthy and growing hair. Put a bunch of dead matter upon live and growing matter and what is the result? Death, decay!

Most of the fashions in hair and dress originate in those whose lives and age compel some artificial aid to attract attention. These foolish and freakish fashions are not for the young woman to adopt. Take the fashion of long trains, for example. The women of Paris seldom walk, they go about in automobiles or carriages. Now, sitting in these open conveyances it attracts attention to have a long folding train wrapped around the sitting figure and pulled up at the ankles to show a dainty slipper and silken hosiery. Don’t you see how ridiculous it is for a good young woman who has to walk to her daily work or school, to try to copy a fashion which is intended for an entirely different class of women? Yet, when trains were the fashion, you all did it.

You are doing about the same foolish thing now with your head. Head-gear—that is the best name for it—is intended for women whose age has depleted them of much hair or whose lives have been such that their hair has become dead through bleaching or other injurious processes—these women must repair the damage. Wigs are too evident, so these women buy the hair which once graced or disgraced some other women, and pile it up in freakish forms and call it the latest fashion. The American girl and young woman immediately follow “the fashion,” and then you ask me what to do for thin hair and dead tresses!

Now, if you keep up this heathenish fashion of ruining your own beautiful hair, many of you will not only have thin hair, but become BALDHEADED. False hair, such as “puffs,” “rats,” frames, pads, “transformations,” “pin curls” and “mouse-traps,” will do the trick for you. Even the artificial means used to puff out the natural hair will ultimately injure it—injure it beyond repair.

All the false hair with the appliances to keep it in shape, press on the scalp and impede the circulation of the blood, and the part of the scalp it should supply will wither and lose all life. The result of any pressure on the blood vessels of the scalp is that the roots of the hair become impoverished, and in time the hair gets so thin and weak that it drops out.

Very little, if any, air can get to the scalp when you are “following the fashion,” which is just now in vogue. Stop this injurious and ridiculous wearing of false puffs, pads, and especially “transformations.”

I have seen schoolgirls and typists with enough rigging of false hair and rusty wires upon their heads to give a strong man a constant headache and make him bald in a month. Your hair also falls out rapidly and constantly, but as you are blessed at the start with more luxuriant and more active growth in the scalp, it takes longer for the injury to show. But it is only a matter of time, not effect.

Then there is another matter which you do not fully realize—all good and worthy men detest this ill-smelling and dead hair you pile upon your heads. You lose all your fresh appearance, all the looks of a maiden, all the proofs of innocence. Your complexion takes on the hue of the dead hair, and when the fashion passes you can never get back the shining, luxuriant tresses men so dearly admire. Men and youths may not have told you these truths, but way down in their hearts they will pick a girl for a wife or sweetheart who has not the smell of a dead Chinaman, or whose hair has been the abiding place for an old “mouse-trap” and left the mousy odors.