Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/324

 any beauty in stiff and formal styles, and with them it was owing to an ascetic exaltation which led them to quench in feminine beauty everything which pertained to passion and the senses, and to portray their seraphic ideals without a soft curve or a graceful touch to relieve their sainted immobility."

We may add some advice about the propriety—in an artistic sense—of making use of coloring matters for the hair when gray, and on the employment of false hair and wigs. The story is related of the Emperor Augustus, that on one occasion he found his daughter Julia undergoing the operation of having her gray hairs plucked from her head by her tire-woman. "Would you prefer, my daughter," said the Emperor, "to be gray, or to be bald?" She replied that grayness was more to her mind. "Then," rejoined her father, "why do you adopt the most certain means to be bald?" The Emperor's question has a wider application, for many a one, eagerly recurring to some of the advertised means of darkening the hair, have learned only too late that thereby they have exchanged grayness for baldness.

There are some faces which are decidedly improved by gray hair. They acquire a dignity and attractiveness, which they never previously had. Like some landscapes, their charms are greatest when covered with the snows of the winter time of life. Such faces should never be marred by dyed hair.