Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/187



Melt together and add burnt cork, 2 ounces. "Wigs and false hair of all kinds cannot be justified on the score of health and taste, however they may be authorized by the edicts of fashion. A quantity of dead matter kept constantly on the head heats it inordinately, and is the cause of many of those anomalous pains vaguely termed nervous. The fashionable chignon of our times is probably as unwholesome as it is ugly; by its pressure and heat it is sure to produce premature baldness. It looks like a diseased excrescence, and is more appropriate to a museum of morbid anatomy than to the drawing-room of society. The motive for wearing a wig being the vain hope of concealing age, it is seldom that this artifice is made to harmonize with the years of the wearer. Hence we constantly see a luxuriant periwig of curls crowning an antique and wrinkled brow, and a profuse front of dark hair topping the shriveled face of age. There are no greater shocks to reverence than these incongruities.

"A perfect forehead, according to the accepted laws of proportion, should be of the same length as the nose and that part of the face below it. It should be free from irregularities and wrinkles, but not too torpid to be rippled by emotion. Above it ought to recede, and below advance. The color of its skin should be lighter than that of the rest of the face. The ancients admired a low forehead in woman, and every antique statue of the female has it. A large, bare forehead gives her a masculine and defiant look. The word effrontery comes from it. The practice of forcing back the hair not only injures it, but gives a false height to the forehead, which,— we think, takes much from the beauty of a woman's face. "The skin of the forehead of young girls is apt to blush with an excessive facility. This tendency, if not checked, will cause a permanent redness, very unfavorable to beauty. In many cases, no doubt, this is owing to some bodily disorder which requires medical treatment."

[A few spoonfuls of any light aperient is all that is required, — save where obstructions exist, and then a little barosmyn or chlorylle will set the matter shortly right.]