Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/29

 What is personal beauty?

It is the combination of correct proportion and color with perfect performance of function.

Perfect performance of function requires health and grace; proportion and color are under the control of fixed laws of taste.

In accordance with this definition, our plan shall be to take up the human body as a whole, and then in its several parts, and show first what is the true artistic ideal of perfect form in each. Then we shall examine one by one the defects and imperfections to which each is subject, and how these may be remedied either by medical or by cosmetic art. Many such flaws in nature's handiwork we shall find may readily be prevented, or cured, or, at least, concealed, by simple means within the reach of all. But others require the hand of the surgeon or the skill of the physician. It is gratifying to think how few blemishes there are that by one or another means at our command may not be lessened or wholly removed.

For the matter of color, which includes the complexion, etc., we shall treat of that in a chapter devoted to the skin; and as the hair is, in the language of anatomy, an appendage of the skin, what we have to say about it will find an appropriate place at the close.

That other branch of personal beauty which treats of dress, the arrangement of the hair, and the study of corporeal grace, we shall but casually touch upon, as it