Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/240

 rubbed over the skin. Lemon-juice, too, has its advocates.

A quicker procedure is to dissolve magnesia in clean rain water, beat it to a thick mass, spread it on the face, and let it remain for two or three minutes. Then wash it off with Castile soap and tepid soft water, and rinse thoroughly.

A thin plaster spread with tartaric acid also acts efficiently and promptly.

The solutions of corrosive sublimate, and other powerful agents, used by some persons are altogether too dangerous to form part of a lady's toilet washes under ordinary circumstances. They may fall into the hands of children, and destroy their lives. Moreover, while their cosmetic value is indisputable when judiciously employed, we have known some cases where extremely weak solutions—much milder than ordinarily used—have caused violent and painful eruptions. We leave them then among those agents only to be employed under the eye of the physician.

Freckles are likewise the marks of Apollo's kisses. Many a fine skin is spotted over with them on the first exposure to the winds of March, and its vernal sun. They remain during the summer, and nearly or quite disappear in winter. Others have them all the year. They, too, are deposits of carbon beneath the scarf-skin. Place some blistering fluid over one, and the scarf-skin will come away, and the freckle with it.