PART I.

THE COMPLEXION.

It has been stated in the papers lately that the Amsterdam physician to the poor, late Empress of Austria did much by his prescriptions to maintain the beauty of that most beautiful and accomplished lady. And yet the Empress was by no means a vain woman, and this is proved by the fact that, now she is gone, there has been no photograph of her taken these twenty years.

I thought that I might state as an axiom that beauty is impossible without a fair amount of health. That for instance, a beautiful complexion was incompatible with a very serious disease. But I find that here I am mistaken. "I want a complexion like a girl in a decline," a woman said to me the other day. I wonder if she had ever seen a girl in "a decline." To me the dull purple cheeks and lips of advanced consumption are most ghastly. Other women strive after a dead white face, and poison themselves with arsenic to try to obtain it.

The beautiful shades of red and white which are admired by most persons are, however, impossible without good health. Late hours, indigestion, lack of exercise and the use of cosmetics will destroy a good complexion, and when once it has gone it is by no means easy to regain.

Of course I do not know, but I strongly suspect that every girl who has a good complexion is too careful of her appearance to need any of the crude hints that I can give to her less favoured sisters about improving their complexions.

The best complexions to be found are not in the drawing-rooms of Mayfair but in the slums of Whitechapel. Many dirty little ragamuffins have far finer complexions than any of the leaders of fashion. This is sufficient proof that soap and water are not the causes of a fine cheek. Rather is it the outdoor life, the not too liberal diet, the absence of stimulants, the early hours and the loose clothing of the urchin that give her her good complexion.

All soap used for washing the face should be of fine quality. You should never wash your face in very hot water. You should not go out in a wind without a veil, and you should never lace tightly if you wish to have a good complexion. When the face gets rough, as it is apt to do after a walk in the wind, a very little glycerine and rosewater or glycerine and cucumber will help to keep the face clear and soft. Cosmetics are undoubtedly a fertile cause of the bad complexions so common among the upper middle classes, and though by no means all cosmetics are harmful, you should be very careful what you put on your face.

Freckles are very annoying to some girls. They are caused, as you doubtless know, by the sun. It is not the heat, but the light of the sun that causes freckles, and it is the violet of the light that causes them. The colour red absorbs the violet rays of the sun, and therefore a red veil or a red parasol should be used by women who are very prone to become freckled. I am not going to say that a red parasol will entirely prevent freckling, but it does very materially lessen it.

Many persons, who would otherwise have a good complexion, are marred by what are called "birth-marks." These are of three kinds—moles, port wine stains and "spider nævi."

A mole that is small and not very disfiguring should be left severely alone. You can do great harm by meddling with it, and not uncommonly it is made very much worse by caustic or poisonous applications. If you have a large and really disfiguring mole on your face have it removed by a surgeon. The younger you are the better will be the result of the operation. A minute scar will be left where the cut was made, but if the mole was removed early in life the scar will be a small linear mark often quite unnoticeable. These big moles are, in themselves, somewhat dangerous, for in elderly people they occasionally develop into cancers.

Moles not removed are to be left alone. But to this there is one exception. If hairs grow upon the moles, they must be removed if possible. The only safe way (excluding electrolysis which is rarely called for) to treat the hairs on moles is to cut them short. You should never irritate a mole by pulling hairs out. The soft, downy hair so common on small moles may be bleached with peroxide of hydrogen if very noticeable.

Can anything reasonable be done for port wine stains? Yes, if they are small. Tattooing with the electro-cautery is a fairly efficacious method of treating these disfiguring marks. Electrolysis is quite useless for this purpose. No other treatment is satisfactory except removal, where this is practicable.

The "spider" nævus is a small dilated vein, usually situated on a very conspicuous part of the nose. It looks just like a little red spider, and can be readily removed by plunging a tiny electro-needle into the body of the "spider."

Wounds on the face, as elsewhere on the body, do not leave a scar unless they go right through the skin. Serious wounds of the face always leave scars, and the scars will be prominent in inverse ratio to the skill with which the original cut was treated. All considerable wounds of the face should be stitched up with horsehair and treated on rigid antiseptic principles so as to obtain rapid healing. The more rapidly a wound heals the less disfiguring will be the resulting scar.

Many women complain very bitterly of a dark ring round their necks. It is natural for the skin round the neck to be darker in colour than that on the face or chest. If the ring is really very dark and conspicuous, carefully applying a little peroxide of hydrogen will often make it less noticeable.

I will not say much about face powders save that those containing any colouring matter, lead or arsenic, should never be used by any one. Where there is a tendency to acne, powder must only be used with extreme caution. Unquestionably powder of any kind is a mistake.

(To be continued.)