Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/284

 arts of the toilet within the limits prescribed by the laws of health and good sense, will permit themselves to use it or have it applied.

HAIR-POWDERS.

Within a few years the ancient custom of powdering the hair has come again into vogue. In the last century it was almost universal, and one of William Pitt's famous methods of raising the revenue was to tax hair-powder. He estimated, in 1795, that the amount of flour annually consumed for this purpose in the United Kingdom represented the enormous and incredible value of six million dollars! This must have been excessive.

When we called it an ancient custom we may not have been correct, as it cannot be traced further back than the end of the sixteenth century. Singular to say, the first who introduced it were the nuns in the French convents. Those who had occasion to leave temporarily the walls of the cloisters for any purpose were wont to powder their hair, so as to make it appear gray, and give them a venerable and aged look. The fashionable dames were struck with the excellent and novel effect of white powder on dark hair, and soon appropriated the device as one of the arts of the worldly toilet. The reverend fathers probably thought that here was another instance where the livery of heaven had been seized to serve the devil in, and now