The Arts of Beauty/Chapter 12

The eyes have been called the "windows of the soul," and all that I have said in another part of this book of the influence of the passions on the beauty or deformity of the face, applies with peculiar force in this place. Nowhere will ill-nature and bad passions show themselves so glancingly as in the eyes. Whenever we would find out what the soul is, we look straightway into its "windows." If they close upon us, or turn away, we are forced to conclude that all is not right within. On the other hand, where we see frank, happy, laughing eyes, we naturally believe that amiability, sincerity, and truth are in the heart. It is not so much the color or the size of the eyes, as it is their expression that makes them beautiful.

There is no more wretched deformity to a woman than a certain unnatural, and studied languishing of the eyes, which vain and silly women sometimes effect. I have read that when Sir Peter Lely painted a celebrated belle, who had the sweet peculiarity of a long and languishing eye, no fashionable lady for a long time appeared in public who did not affect the soft sleepiness and tender slow moving look of Sir Peter's ​picture. The result, of course, was, that queer leers and squints everywhere met a gentleman's gaze in the distorted faces of the fair. There is no one of the beautiful organs of woman that needs to be left so entirely to the unconstrained art of nature as the eye. Let woman believe that all the tricks played with the eyes, are absurd and ruinous to beauty. It once happened in Turkey that the monarch expressed his great admiration for "large and dark-lashed eyes." From that hour, all the fair slaves on whom nature had not bestowed "the wild stag-eye in sable ringlets rolling," set to work to supply the deficiency with circles of antimony. Thousands of beautiful women must have frightfully distorted themselves. There is, almost invariably, a lovely harmony between the color of the eyes and its fringes and the complexion of a woman, which cannot be broken up by art without an insult to nature. The fair complexion is generally accompanied with blue eyes, light hair, and light eyebrows and eye-lashes. The delicacy of one feature is preserved, in effect and beauty, by the corresponding softness of the other. But take this fair creature, and draw a black line over her softly tinctured eyes, stain their beamy fringes with a sombre hue, and how frightfully have you mutilated nature! On the other hand, a brunette with light eye-brows, would be a caricature of a beautiful woman. If a woman has the misfortune from disease, or otherwise, to have deficient eye-brows, she may delicately supply the want, as far as she can, with artificial pencilling; but, in doing this, she must scrupulously follow nature, and make the color of her penciling to ​correspond with her complexion. The eastern women, many of whom have large dark eyes, have great skill in pencilling the eye so as to add to its natural power; but I have witnessed ridiculous failures in such tricks, even there. The Turkish and Circassian women use henna for peneilling the eyes. Among the Arabs of the desert, the women blacken the edge of their eye-lids with a black powder, and draw a line round the eye with it, to make the organ appear large. Large black eyes are the standard of beauty among nearly all eastern women.

The Spanish ladies have a custom of squeezing orange juice into their eyes to make them brilliant. The operation is a little painful for a moment, but there is no doubt that it does cleanse the eye, and impart to it, temporarily, a remarkable brightness. But the best recipe for bright eyes is to keep good hours. Just enough regular and natural sleep is the great enkindler of "woman's most charming light."

And, before I close this chapter, let me warn ladies against the use of white veils. Scarcely anything can strain and jade and injure the eye more than this practice. There is reason to believe that the sight sometimes becomes permanently injured by them.

It is within the power of almost every lady to have long and strong eye-lashes by simply chipping, with scissors, the points of the hair once in five or six weeks.