Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/24

 secret arts and mysteries of the toilette, by which we outdo nature at her best, and crown her highest efforts with an added glory.

If we take under our special charge this slighted branch of study, if we seek to bend to its elucidation whatever the austere oracles of medicine and the humbler artisans of the shops can furnish us, let not the effort be disdained. Innocent devices to heighten the effect of beauty have nothing derogatory about them. For, as the wisest of poets has said:—

"Nature is made better by no mean, But nature makes that mean: so, o'er that art, Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art That nature makes. Which does mend nature—change it rather: but The art itself is nature."
 * * *  * This is an art

It is our intent to lay down those rules by which the most desirable form, color, and grace in the human body can be obtained and preserved; and further to tell of those artifices, if you will, by which these qualities can be imitated when they cannot be acquired. Some of these means are dangerous and injurious. Against them we shall speak words of warning. Others are harmless; and to them there can be no objection from the physician's point of view. But we know our responsibility does not cease here. Do we run the danger of ministering to vanity, or to deceitfulness?