Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/205

 fluid, which is known in France as lait virginal, virgin's milk, and is highly and justly esteemed. None of the cosmetic washes is more agreeable. Some glycerine can be added to the water if desired.

We doubt if benzoin is a whit inferior to the Balm of Mecca, or Balm of Gilead, the most famous of all the cosmetic applications of the Orient. So precious and rare is this that it would be dog-cheap at Constantinople at its weight in gold. A pound of the best quality sells there for about fifteen hundred dollars in specie! As for France, England, or America, they get nothing but the refuse.

When Lady Mary Wortley Montague visited Constantinople early in the last century it was more plentiful, and as all her lady friends in Paris and London besieged her for some, she procured several jars of it. On going to bed she rubbed some of it thoroughly on her face. The next morning she woke up with her cheeks red and swollen, "as if she had a dozen toothaches." This alarmed her terribly, but in a few days the swelling disappeared, and all her friends assumed her she was vastly improved in looks. She writes, however, in her Letters, that she has no notion of undergoing the ordeal again.

Indeed, the balsam is said to be used only in very minute quantities, and thus applied, may well deserve its reputation, for the Bible itself speaks of it under