Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/316

 on sensitive skins may leave an unpleasant though temporary redness.

Professor Redwood some years since landed in very high terms a strong solution of the sulphuret of barium as a depilatory. When used, it must be mixed rapidly with finely-powdered starch, and applied to the part. Its application demands skill and care, and with these, it is a very good depilatory.

But all the barium salts are poisonous, and though this is undoubtedly an efficient preparation, as there are other and innocuous means, we advise them to be patronized in place of others.

In preference to any of these chemical depilatories we prefer the mechanical. This is simply pulling the hairs out "by the roots." This has an alarming sound, and suggests torture. But there is no occasion for terror. If properly performed, the operation is painless. Fine tweezers, or "ciliary forceps," may be used, and the sensation of the part previously blunted by pressing against it firmly a piece of ice, or allowing the spray of ether to fall upon it for a few seconds.

An old-fashioned method for heroic beauties used to be to press firmly upon the part a piece of shoemaker's wax, in which the hairs would become firmly imbedded, and then jerk it away, hairs and all! This demands an amount of heroism to which modern belles are rarely equal, and modern chemistry, therefore, ever obedient to the demands of its queens, has contrived a composi