Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/198

 degenerate age. All soap made thus contains an excess of alkali, and particles of fat not saponified. Both these ingredients are harmful to the skin, leaving it rough, tender, and apt to pimple. It is much better to use no soap at all than one which has these injurious qualities.

Toilet soaps should be prepared from clean, sweet tallow or oil by a strong solution of soda, and it is essential that they be completely deprived of an excess of alkali. Their natural color is always a yellow or white, and whatever other hue is given them is artificially done by the admixture of coloring matter.

Brown Windsor is colored by caramel or cacao; rose color is produced by cinnabar, green by chrome-*green, and many of the reds by aniline colors. These latter are derived from the distillation of coal oil, and some of them, the fashionable coralline for example, are exceedingly irritating to the skin of many persons, so they should be employed with caution. The dark lines in Castile soap are produced by a preparation of iron, which is harmless.

Any desired perfume can be imparted to soaps, and so long as this is done by the natural odorous portions of the plants, there is no cause of complaint. But most of the toilet soaps sold are perfumed by the artificial essences derived from fusel oil and petroleum, the effects of which upon a delicate skin are occasionally acrid and unpleasant.