Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/224

 the Lyons house invited him once more, and put the inquiry:—

"What was the state of the weather when you made the experiment?"

"The weather!" replied the Englishman, "the weather! I don't remember. What has that to do with it?"

"Everything," replied the principal. "It is only on the fairest days in this favored climate, that we can make our carmine."

"If that's your secret," said the visitor, "I had better have kept my thirty thousand francs, as it will do me little good in the London fogs."

There are numerous forms in which rouge is applied. The simplest is "rose powder," which is merely the finest rice meal, tinged with carmine, and perfumed with oil of roses, or some other scent. What is called "enamel powder" is a mixture of equal parts of bismuth (pearl-white) and French chalk (soapstone), colored and scented in the same manner. Either of these is harmless, for neither carmine nor carthamine has any injurious action on the skin.

When rouge is sold by itself, it comes in shallow pots or saucers, rose en tasse, in pomade, en crêpons, or en feuilles. The crêpons are pieces of silk or cotton gauze, twisted into the shape of a plug, and imbued with the coloring matter (carthamine.) Some of them are mounted on wooden or ivory handles, and are then