Confidential Chats with Girls

by William Lee Howard

And probably, shortly after, this same girl or woman will wonder why she has pimples, blotches or sore lips. Then she goes to the druggist for a “face balm” which temporarily hides the real trouble. Finally she has to go to the doctor, who finds it is too late to repair all the damage done through ignorance, foolishness and the drug.

Don’t use arsenic in any form for your complexion or to give your face a plump appearance. Some of you will tell me of a girl you know who has a nice plump face from the use of arsenic wafers. “She used ‘to be a fright’; skinny in the face and deep lines.” Certainly, and now she looks to be in good health.

But she is not; she is in a dangerous state, and if she keeps up the arsenic poisoning she will discover this fact.

In the girl, arsenic will produce a certain amount of fat—unnatural of course—in hollows or pits which full growth will attend to if the girl will have patience. Poisoning herself with arsenic makes fat in the undeveloped tissues of the face. This gives her a plump appearance. So will plenty of whisky, and in about the same manner. But if the fatness was confined only to the cheeks the harm would not be so great, but like whisky again, it puts fat around delicate internal tissues. A girl who has plump cheeks from the use of arsenic has also a “plumpness” around her kidneys, fat over her growing ovaries and inmeshing the tiny cells of the liver. Fatty degeneration of these organs takes place for which there is no remedy.

All headache medicines, such as antipyrine, are not only dangerous, but will ruin a complexion; bring out pimples as certain as the sun shines. The habitual taking of any kind of bromide, bromo seltzer, bromo quinine, and all the other kinds of advertised “sedatives,” will cause a peculiar rash not only upon the face, but upon the body. I frequently see girls in shops, stores and even in the high schools, whose faces tell the story of some kind of drug-store “treatment.”

Lately there has come to the surface another kind of patent medicine fake which is apt to fool the most open-eyed. This is one you all know of but not about. It is that kind of advertisement which has nothing to sell. It purports to be the outpouring of some philanthropist’s heart who wishes to do something for his suffering fellow man—or generally woman. You see he has nothing to sell—don’t want your money, simply spend thousands of dollars every week to tell you how to get rid of “that uncomfortable feeling.” No matter what is the trouble—house care, worry over your studies or “who sent me THAT valentine”—liver, womb or rheumatism—it is all the same; just go to your druggist and get these simple remedies and take as directed.

Then follows the prescription. At first glance, yes, at the second, you or your mother read the simple home remedies such as tinct. rhubarb, olive oil, simple syrup, extract of quassia, etc., and think that such a recipe must be harmless and certainly good. The advertisement tells you just to get your druggist to fill the recipe. Well, how can there be anything wrong with such harmless and free advice? But you will see inserted among all these harmless and simple and well known remedies, some such direction as “two ounces of badum” or “tinct. of fulum, original package.” Now you see the nigger in the woodpile. The whole scheme is to get you to purchase the fake “badum.” This is distributed among the druggists and when you go to pay the bill you find that the simple prescription is an expensive one. The druggist tells you that the “badum” is a very expensive ingredient. It probably costs the fakers a few cents and is simply sugar of milk or some equally harmless and legally allowed drug.

Don’t kiss anyone but your mother and father.

Don’t forget that flies are the most dangerous germ carriers we have, and don’t buy or eat anything which has been exposed to flies and street dust.

Don’t have any pity for the flies or insects—kill them.