The Arts of Beauty/Chapter 4

The most perfect form will avail a woman little, unless it possess also that brightness which is the finishing touch and final polish of a beautiful lady. What avails a plump and well-rounded neck or shoulder if it is dim and dingy withal? What charm can be found in the finest modelled arm if its skin is coarse and rusty? A grater, even though moulded in the shape of the most charming female arm, would possess small attractions to a man of taste and refinement.

I have to tell you, ladies—and the same must be said to the gentlemen, too—that the great secret of acquiring a bright and beautiful skin lies in three simple things, as I have said in my lecture on Beautiful Women—temperance, exercise, and cleanliness. A young lady, were she as fair as Hebe, as charming as Venus herself, would soon destroy it all by too high living and late hours. "Take the ordinary fare of a fashionable woman, and you have a style of living which is sufficient to destroy the greatest beauty. It is not the quantity so much as the quality of the dishes that produces the mischief. Take, for instance, only strong coffee and hot bread and butter, and you have a diet which is most destructive to beauty. The heated grease, long in ​dulged in, is sure to derange the stomach, and, by creating or increasing bilious disorders, gradually overspreads the fair skin with a wan or yellow hue. After this meal comes the long fast from nine in the morning till five or six in the afternoon, when dinner is served, and the half-famished beauty sits down to sate a keen appetite with peppered soups, fish, roast, boiled, broiled, and fried meat; game, tarts, sweet-meats, ices, fruits, etc., etc., etc. How must the constitution suffer in trying to digest this mélange! How does the heated complexion bear witness to the combustion within! Let the fashionable lady keep up this habit, and add the other one of late hours, and her own looking-glass will tell her that 'we all do fade as the leaf.' The firm texture of the rounded form gives way to a flabby softness, or yields to a scraggy leanness, or shapeless fate. The once fair skin assumes a pallid rigidity or bloated redness, which the deluded victim would still regard as the roses of health and beauty. And when she at last becomes aware of her condition, to repair the ravages she flies to paddings, to give shape where there is none; to stays, to compress into form the swelling chaos of flesh; and to paints, to rectify the dingy complexion. But vain are all these attempts. No; if dissipation, late hours, and immoderation have once wrecked the fair vessel of female charms, it is not in the power of Esculapius himself to right the shattered bark, and make it ride the sea in gallant trim again."^[1]

Cleanliness is a subject of indispensable considera​tion in the pursuit of a beautiful skin. The frequent use of the tepid bath is the best cosmetic I can recommend to my readers in this connection. By such ablutions, the accidental corporeal impurities are thrown off, cutaneous obstructions removed; and while the surface of the body is preserved in its original brightness, many threatening disorders are prevented. It is by this means that the women of the East render their skins as soft and fair as those of the tenderest babes. I wish to impress upon every beautiful woman, and especially upon the one who leads a city life, that she cannot long preserve the brightness of her charms without a daily resort to this purifying agent. She should make the bath as indispensable an article in her house as her looking-glass.