Hands and Complexions.--Preparing for Parties.--Refining Rough
Faces.--Carbolic Baths.--Chalk and Cascarilla.--Glycerine
Wash.--School-girls’ Flushed Hands and Faces.--To Soften the
Hands.--Red Noses.--Secrets of Making-up.--Cologne for the
Eyes.--Cosmetic Gloves.--To Impart a Brilliant Complexion.
People are in trouble in cold weather about their hands and their
complexions, which take the time when parties abound, and owners
need their very best looks, to put on a ruinous air. It is more than
suspected that the young lady who begs for some good face powder or
wash that will hide a bad complexion without spoiling it entirely,
has the end in view of making herself presentable in society for the
winter. Her entirely reasonable request shall be attended to, no less
on her own account than because she writes in the name of four devoted
subscribers. Carbolic soaps fail to remove the roughness of her used
complexion, and internal remedies must be resorted to. These should
be prescribed by a physician, and would be passed over at once to his
province had not long experience shown that doctors scoff at the idea
of prescribing for such puny troubles as flesh-worms and pimples while
there are so many typhoid fevers and chronic ulcers to be treated.
The pimples foretold the fever, and the impurities that first showed
themselves in the shape of “black-heads” might have been discharged
at the time, and not left to malignant issues. Pimples are disease
of a light form, and nature tries to throw off in this way bad blood
that might give one a worse turn if kept in the body. It can not be
said too often that next to keeping murder and wickedness out of one’s
soul is the necessity of keeping one’s blood pure by good food, strict
cleanliness, warmth, and bright, sweet air. These troublesome pimples
are a sign that the young ladies who complain of them have eaten
food that did not suit them, eaten irregularly, or not bathed often
enough, since some skins require more frequent cleansing and stimulus
than others, because they secrete more. Perhaps other functions are
disturbed, or the blood is not stirred enough by lively exercise.
Directions for diet have been given before in these pages. It will be
enough to recommend people with irritable blood to drink a glass or
two of mild cider, or eat oranges or lemons, as they fancy, within
the half hour before each meal, especially before breakfast. As hard
work or exercise as one can endure stirs sluggish secretions, and work
should always be brisk. Many a young woman mopes over house-work day
after day, standing on her feet most of the time, and fancies that she
has exercise, when her slow blood does not once in ten hours receive
impulse enough to send it vigorously from head to foot in a way one
could call living. “Work swiftly and rest well,” ought to be a woman’s
rule. When the blood flows swiftly, the eye is clear, the sight better,
the skin refined, and the whole body feels improvement; memory and
thought are improved, idleness takes wing, and happiness steals into
the heart.
Young ladies should not give up their bathing with carbolic soap. Hot
water, with a spoonful of prophylactic fluid or phenyl to each quart,
is a very wholesome bath in skin disorders, followed by a brisk rub
with crash till warm, or wrapping in a blanket by the fire till all
danger of chilliness is past. The phenyl and prophylactic fluid are
milder forms of carbolic acid, and, like it, disinfectant and healing.
A sponge-bath or plunge at seventy-five degrees after a hot bath
prevents all weakening effects and taking cold. None but robust persons
should ever take baths except in a warm room. The bath-room should
always be so arranged as to be heated in a few minutes. Otherwise the
bath is best taken in one’s own room before the fire.
The disguise for a bad skin is easily found. Refined chalk is the
safest thing to use, and costs far less by its own name than put up
in photograph boxes as “Lily White,” etc. Cascarilla powder, which
the Cuban ladies use so much, is recommended as entirely harmless.
It is prepared from a root used in medicine, and in New York is
sold at all the little Cuban shops, with cigars, tropic sweetmeats,
and other necessaries of life. Either wash the face with thick suds
from glycerine soap, and dust the powder on with a swan’s-down puff,
removing superfluous traces with a fresh puff kept for the purpose,
or else grind the powder in wet linen by pressing it in the fingers,
and apply what oozes through to the skin. A fine wash for a rough or
sunburned skin is made of two ounces of distilled water, one ounce
of glycerine, one ounce of alcohol, and half an ounce of tincture
of benzoin. Without the water, and with the addition of two ounces
of prepared chalk free from bismuth, it makes a far better cosmetic
for whitening the face than any of the expensive “Balms of Youth” or
“Magnolia Blooms.” If a flesh tint is desired, add a grain of carmine.
The lesser trial of rough, red hands that are not chapped but
unsightly, when not caused by exposure and work, indicates bad
circulation of the blood. School-girls who study a good deal without
due exercise often go home with flushed faces and red hands, to say
nothing of an irritable state of the nerves, that can only be righted
by very regular sleep and exercise, aided by hot foot-baths. Out-door
exercise in winter is an excellent corrective for rush of blood to the
head. Dancing brings the blood into play more healthfully than any
movement allowed to grown women. The hands are improved by wearing
gloves that fit closely, especially if they are of soft castor or
dog-skin. In most cases, all that is needed to soften hands is to rub
sweet-almond oil into the skin two or three days in succession. A
quicker way than this in the country is to hold the hand on a rapidly
turning grindstone a moment or two. It leaves the palm, forefinger, and
thumb satin smooth, and removes callosities incredibly quick, taking
off bad stains at the same time. Farmers’ girls will take note of
this, and also that rubbing the hands with a slice of raw potato will
remove vegetable stains. Rubbing the hands well with almond-oil, and
plastering them with as much fine chalk as they can take, on going to
bed, will usually whiten them in three days’ time, and this hint may be
of service before a party of consequence.
Redness of the nose is a sign of bad circulation and of humor in the
blood. It is best treated by applications of phenyl, rubbed on often
each day, and by alteratives. A spoonful of white mustard-seed taken
in water before breakfast every morning is of service in this case
and in rush of blood to the head, which always has something to do
with constipation. Refined chalk made into a thick plaster with one
third as much glycerine as water, and spread on the parts, will cool
erysipelatous inflammation and reduce the redness.
The secrets of “making-up” have hardly all been mentioned, though the
list is growing long. What girl does not know that eating lump-sugar
wet with Cologne just before going out will make her eyes bright, or
that the homelier mode of flirting soap-suds into them has the same
effect? Spanish ladies squeeze orange juice into their eyes to make
them shine. A Continental recipe for whitening the hands looks strong
enough: Take half a pound of soft-soap, a gill of salad-oil, an ounce
of mutton tallow, and boil together; after boiling ceases, add one
gill of spirits of wine and a scruple of ambergris; rip a pair of
gloves three sizes too large, spread them with this paste, and sew up
to be worn at night. A curious wash, evidently Italian in its origin,
is: Equal parts of melon, pumpkin, gourd, and cucumber seeds pounded
to powder, softened with cream, and thinned to a paste with milk,
perfumed with a grain of musk and three drops of oil of lemon (oil of
jasmine may be substituted for the musk). The face, bosom, and arms
are anointed with this overnight, and washed off in warm water in
the morning. The authority quoted says it adds remarkable purity and
brilliance to the complexion. Such pains will women take for that
beauty which, after all, is only skin deep. But did not De Staël say
she would give half her knowledge for personal charms.