Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/258

 several times a day, and allowed to remain on the face.

A teaspoonful of powdered alum dissolved in a tumbler of water is another often successful wash, which should be applied in the same manner.

If, after trying either of these for a fortnight, no benefit is apparent, then the face should be washed with strong soft soap at night, and the pimples smeared with a paste made of flowers of sulphur and spirits of camphor. This should be washed off next morning, and the spots rubbed with a small quantity of glycerine.

Sea-bathing, or a visit to the Sulphur Springs of Virginia (either the White or the Red Sulphur), or those equally efficient sulphurous sources in Florida, or washing with sulphur soap, will be of great avail. A bath of some kind should be taken daily, and the skin well rubbed, as by this means the pores of the whole body are opened, and those of the face have therefore less to do.

Such pimples are most common on the forehead and cheeks. There is another variety still more annoying. They commence on the nose, and spread from it as a centre over the face. The surface is red, and swollen into small lumps, which the vulgar call "carbuncles," or "rum-blossoms," because the popular belief is that they generally come from hard-drinking. This is not true, for they are less frequent in men than