CHAPTER XX
ADVICE TO BLONDES AND BRUNETTES
SIX subjects are of special consideration to the blonde. She must remember that her type has the most delicate of complexions. To accentuate her blondness she should keep her hair as light as possible. She should eat such food as will enrich her golden coloring. She should avoid whatever tends to the accumulation of fat. She should guard against the faded appearance that comes early to most blondes. She should dress to emphasize her golden coloring.
While it is true that woman’s hair is her crowning glory, a blonde’s hair is her aureole, her halo of beauty.
Half the time and attention she gives to her toilet should be given to her hair. The blonde’s hair, as a rule, has a golden tint. This tint is the keynote of her beauty, and should be enhanced in every possible way.
She may wash her hair as often as she likes with no fear of its fading. The lighter it becomes the better. For her there need be no fear of using carefully those aids in cleansing the hair, ammonia, borax or washing soda. Each of these, if used often, tends to make the hair several shades lighter—but in too large quantities it will make the hair brittle.
Because it does not matter how light her hair becomes, the blonde may wash her hair oftener than the brunette does. A shampoo in borax water once or twice a week soon lightens the hair. One tablespoonful of borax in a gallon of water is sufficient.
Two shampoos a week in water in which ammonia has been sprinkled soon brings about a lightening of the hair. One gallon of water and half a wineglass of ammonia is a good proportion.
Two shampoos a week in a gallon of warm water with a heaping tablespoonful of washing soda in it is the speediest agent I know for lightening the hair, excepting peroxide, which some blondes who do not wish to actually bleach their hair use in small proportions in the shampoo. One tablespoonful of peroxide of hydrogen in a gallon of water is the usual proportion.
Every one expects light hair to be fluffy. Fluffiness is the accompaniment of goldenness in hair, and the observer of beauty is always disappointed if he sees fair hair smooth. Smoothness seems to belong rather to dark hair. The blonde should so comb and brush her hair that each hair is distinct and separate from the others. This gives an aureole-like effect to her face, and wonderfully softens her features.
The blonde knows that fair hair is expected to be fluffy. If it isn’t she can make it so by drawing it into a loose mass after a shampoo and tying it with a ribbon, letting it dry thus. If the hair is long it can be tied again by another ribbon close to the ends, making it curve or wave.
The blonde’s skin being finer and more delicate has a greater tendency to wrinkle. Wrinkles come early to her because her skin is so delicate. It is like rice paper, forming fine surface wrinkles as well as deeper ones. For this reason her motto should be “Oil, oil, oil.”
The blonde’s complexion is comparable to that of a rose. It has a superb bloom, but fades early. The withered rose petal is one of the most pathetic sights in nature. It is a danger signal to the blonde, saying sadly to her, “Guard well your complexion!”
The blonde should remember that the dry skin is the forerunner of wrinkles, and literally keep her skin well oiled. Occasionally a blonde, if stout, is troubled by a greasy skin. This old cosmetic has corrected that fault:
Sulphate of zinc, 2 grains; compound tincture of lavender, 8 minims; distilled water, 1 ounce.
This cream is of the soft sort that is especially adapted to a blonde’s delicate complexion:
Oil of sweet almonds, ½ ounce; olive oil, ½ ounce; oil of poppies, ½ ounce; white wax, ½ ounce; spermaceti, ½ ounce. First melt the white wax over a slow fire, pour in the other ingredients, and stir briskly until they cool and reach a cream-like consistency.
For a skin that is chronically dry, I recommend the use of almond meal instead of soap. It is not only cleansing, but injects into the pores the needed oil. I also advise frequent use of this:
Almond oil, 2 ounces; extract of Italian pink, 12 drops.
Many blondes when they are young are afflicted with unbecoming flushing of the skin. Sunburn and wind roughening are an affliction to the owners of such complexions. For these the compounds containing a generous amount of honey are healing and soothing. The following I have always heard recommended as efficacious by many blonde friends:
Honey, 1 ounce; almond oil, 1 ounce; white wax, 1 ounce; spermaceti, 1 ounce.
Now and then a complexion rebels against glycerine. This is more liable to be true of blondes, although I recall at this moment six at least who use the following to tone down the redness when their skin has been irritated:
Camphor water, 1 pint; glycerine, ½ ounce; powdered borax, ¼ ounce.
As her skin is more delicate, so the facial massage should be lighter than that given the brunette. It should indeed be the new massage, the patting, the raindrop sort of treatment, instead of the severe treatment of the old régime.
Always with a view to keeping and enhancing the golden tints in hair and skin, the blonde should be careful to eat such food as will feed the pigment that produces the wheat-like hair and apple blossom skin.
I have before spoken of Mme. de Crequy, the French beauty, who was in many respects a model to the other beauties of the court of France. Her biographers said that Mme. de Crequy had the loveliest complexion ever granted to woman. They said in the next line that she ate every day thirty oranges and almost nothing else.
The orange is the best friend of the complexion among the fruits. It clears the complexion marvelously, but it has besides the property of holding much of the golden shade in solution. A blonde whom I know tried the experiment of eating a half dozen oranges a day and increasing the number to a dozen daily for three months. In that time the change in her coloring was marvelously for the better. Her hair, which had been a shade too pale, took on the rich yellow of cornsilk.
When she had quite convinced herself of the fact that oranges are the food of beauty, and especially of blonde beauty, she was advised also to eat many carrots. This she did in connection with the oranges for six months. She ate carrots sliced and stewed in cream. She ate them in soup. She ate them mashed and seasoned slightly with salt and pepper. She even ate them baked. This she began doing in the early summer. By the same time the next year her hair had deepened three shades and was far richer. And her complexion was fresher, fairer and it harmonized more perfectly with the golden lights in her hair.
The blonde, as a rule, must fight the tendency to accumulate flesh. The man who first wrote “fair, fat and forty” was observant. He had registered the conclusion that the woman who is fair is at forty more than likely to be fat. And so she is. Recognizing this tendency of the placid nature, which is usually an accompaniment of fair face and hair, the blonde should begin to combat it at twenty. Better at eighteen.
She can prevent her waist and hips growing larger by deep massage. The Japanese women never grow fat. Ask them why and they show you how they pinch their hips to crush the tissues and keep the hips flat.
Your funny American dance, the cakewalk, is a great hip-reducer. That backward motion, with the face turned upward and the feet lifted prancingly, draws the tendons, solidifies the muscles and makes the limbs compact.
To reduce the hips, with hands on hips bend forward, swaying the upper body in a half-circle on a horizontal plane.
Stand erect and try to make the elbows meet in the back. This is an excellent exercise to remove the superfluous fat or to prevent superfluous fat forming upon the back.
To make the waist small and pliant stretch the arms high above the head and bend them forward, describing a quarter circle.
To reduce the abdomen, bend forward until the palms touch the floor.
To avoid growing stoutness lie upon the back and raise the body slowly to a sitting posture without bending the knees.
These exercises alone, begun early and persisted in, will keep back the tide of fat that comes with the years to most blondes.
She should guard, I have said, against the early fading that is the blighting tendency of her type. It is nature’s compensation, a revenge nature seems to work at the behest of the jealous brunettes, that the blonde who was so exquisite in youth should early lose the delicacy of her skin and the brilliancy of her hair. But some blondes have prevented this early fading, and what some blondes have done other blondes may do. The cure in this instance is the preventive. The delicate skin that has been well fed will not grow dry and wrinkled early. The blonde who has made carrots and oranges her chief articles of diet for many years, supplying the iron needed to replenish the rich gold of her hair, will not early lose the luster of that hair.
The blonde’s critics say that she should wear gown, hat, shoes and gloves to match, but that she should wear only one color. Perhaps this is untrue, but I have noticed that many of them are disposed to heap color upon color upon their costumes. Violet and green and mauve and black I have seen in one combination. The blonde who wore it looked cheap and common, and the glory of her hair was dulled by it. Had she worn any one of the colors alone, been a symphony in violet, in mauve, in green or in gold, she would have been ravishing. And the splendor of her hair would have been a glory in burnished gold. But she diffused her color effects by her strange costume. Blondes should always dress for their hair.
A rude bachelor said that “blonde” had come to be a term of contempt because there were so few natural ones. Scientists, too, say that her type is decadent and will in the course of a few hundred centuries disappear. But the blonde can enjoy herself for many generations before that happens. And she may remember that the blonde races have been the world rulers for many years.
The history of the evolution of the blonde shows that her origin was in the north, but that she emigrated to the south and ruled the brunette natives. Science gravely informs us that the blonde flourishes in the moistest climates. This great racial fact may be applied to individual cases. Certainly the blonde who wants to cherish her golden hair and fair skin should not turn inland, but to the seashore.
If you are a brunette your glory is your eyes, your menace is your liver, your besetting fault is a lack of cheerfulness.
As to your eyes first. Their color is in itself a guarantee of beauty. There is no shade of brown eyes that is not beautiful, beginning with the golden brown eyes, which the novelists delight to describe as tawny but which I have named tiger color, through the red brown shades—that to some imaginative ones suggest cruelty, to myself the brownish red shades of claret—to the so-called “black” eyes, which are indeed not black, for there are no genuinely black eyes. Place a bit of black velvet beside the darkest eyes you ever saw and note how brown the eyes look beside them.
They run the gamut of beauty. Brown eyes, the shade of the tobacco leaf, Fierenzuola, the Florentine authority on beauty, said are the loveliest eyes in the world. Certainly they are the eyes of sentiment, and sentiment is accepted even in America, though it has not here the importance in individual and national life that it has in Europe.
I have read somewhere that brown eyes ask for love and get it. The eyes of the brunette should shine starlike out of a creamy white face as stars peep through the breaks in a cloud.
The eyes being her glory, the wise brunette takes the best possible care of them. To care well for them she should care well for their surroundings. Eyes are of diminished loveliness indeed if the eyelashes and eyebrows be ill kept. The eyelashes should be thick and soft as silk. They should be long and their loveliness is still greater if they happen to be curly. To keep them in best condition there should be no eyestrain. Reading by a bad light, reading on a moving vehicle, reading in bed, looking at too great distances, or looking too continuously at too bright objects in the sun-light—as at an unshaded lake at high noon or a bit of glass in a high light, continuing at any task after the muscles of the eyes ache, cause eyestrain, and eyestrain causes inflammation of the eye itself, of the linings of the eyelids and of the rims of the eyelids.
Whatever inflames the lining of the eyes inflames the edges of the lids, and from inflamed eyelids the eyelashes fall with alarming swiftness.
Trimming the ends of the eyelashes once in six weeks I find makes them grow longer and thicker. I always have this done by a young person, because a young person’s hand is firmer, and there must be no trembling of the hand that works in the region of the sensitive eye. Use one of the tiny brushes made for eyebrows and eyelashes. Use it every morning and evening. Brush the eyelashes lightly with a downward stroke to make them long, upward to make them curly. Both serve the chief purpose in the culture of eyelashes, which is to keep them clean. You are most careful to keep your velvet gown free from dust. Be careful also of your eyelashes, which are more vitally important to your beauty.
For bathing the eyes to relieve them of inflammation and so to strengthen the eyelashes use this preparation:
Distilled water, 1 pint; cornflowers, 30 grams. Crush the cornflowers in a mortar. Steep them in the water for a day—that is, for twenty-four hours. Strain the liquor through a piece of fine cloth, such as cheesecloth. Heat in a porcelain pan over a moderate fire. Cool and tightly cork. Bathe the eyes night and morning from an eyecup or with an eyedropper.
Spanish women whose eyelashes have faded often apply this mixture to make them darker:
Water, 300 grams; sulphate of iron, 10 grams; gall nuts, 50 grams.
Boil the nuts in the water for a half hour. Strain through cheesecloth or muslin. Add the sulphate of iron. Boil again until the quantity of the liquor is reduced one third. Apply at the root of the eyelashes, being careful not to let any of the mixture touch the eye. The best means of applying it is with a sable pencil. This formula may also be used for the eyebrows.
Brush the eyebrows night and morning, training them to a high arch. The expression of the face is more piquant if the eyebrows be high.
The brunette, even more than the blonde, should develop by every proper means the brilliancy of her eyes, for while the brunette’s chief glory is her eyes, that of the blonde is her hair.
She should, besides taking all the rest she needs—even more than she needs so that she will be sure to have enough—use many cooling lotions. The boracic acid water which I have recommended for the blonde I forbid to the brunette, because it often leaves a sediment which clings to the eyelashes and shows white as hoar frost on the black lashes of the brunette. But for her there is the refreshing eyebath of cool, weak tea, or of this, applied fairly warm:
Rose water, 1 gill; witch hazel, 1 gill.
If the eyes ache persistently, retire to a dark room, lie down and place upon the eyes some cool tea leaves, secured there by the useful eye bandage or bandalette to which I have referred in a previous chapter.
If crow’s-feet appear prematurely about her eyes she should apply lanolin, patting it in thoroughly. Lanolin is the base of most of the skin foods and has no equal, to my present knowledge, as a builder of flesh tissues.
The blonde’s complexion fades early because her skin is extraordinarily thin and fine. The brunette’s, as a rule, is the reverse. A fine almond meal is a good substitute for soap for the blonde’s complexion.
The brunette, because her skin is thicker, and has a tendency to an oily appearance, could to her benefit use once a day a toilet soap made as follows:
White castile soap, 300 grams; spermaceti, 20 grams; oxgall, 10 grams; honey, 20 grams; essence of rosemary, 10 grams; essential oil of oranges, 15 grams; oil of lemon, 20 grams; alcohol, 15 grams; attar of roses, 2 drops.
Melt the spermaceti and the shaven soap in a bain marie. Add the other ingredients one by one, mixing thoroughly after each addition. Pour into molds.
If the brunette finds that the pure, cold creams contain so much oil and lanolin that they encourage the natural oil in her skin, she can feed her skin with slighter nourishment, as for instance some of the cucumber lotions that have from time to time appeared in the articles I have written. This can be prepared at home. Wash and wipe carefully six large cucumbers; leave the rind on and cut the cucumber into inch square cubes. Fill one saucepan with water, and into a small one place twelve ounces of almond oil. Drop the pieces of cucumber into the oil and heat until they reach the boiling point. When it has reached that point put it at the back of the stove and let it simmer for three or four hours. Strain through cheesecloth, crushing out of the cucumbers as much juice as possible. Stir in while it cools four ounces of benzoin. Keep the liquid in a jar in a cool place.
I had not thought there was a brunette who did not know that when she dabs powder on her face in the evening she should choose not white but Rachel, the brunette shade which has a tint of yellow in it. But I have seen brunettes go forth to conquest with their face so white as to make them seem ghastly and repulsive.
Some of my blonde friends in Paris were washing their hair every other week in light ale. They thought this was a tonic for the scalp, and that it made the hair light. My brunette friends, on the contrary, use diluted claret:
Claret, 1 pint; water, 1 pint.
They believe that this helps to keep their hair dark. Prof. Jocquet, my hair specialist in Paris—and by the way there is none better anywhere—cleansed my scalp last summer in lemon juice.
Juice of two lemons; almond oil, 5 drops.
It is Prof. Jocquet’s interesting theory that oil applied directly to the scalp causes the pores to open and disgorge the hairs.
The brunette should look, for a model for her hair, to the luster of black satin. It seems to be the scheme of nature that the brunette should have straight, shiny hair, as it is that the blonde should have crisp, curling hair. Often individuals stray from this plan, but there is no doubt that the plan exists.
I have said that the menace to her brunette beauty is the liver. I repeat it. In the brunette there is always, as an accompaniment of dark pigment, a torpidly inclined liver. That lazy liver, if permitted, will make her complexion muddy, her eyes dull, her movements sluggish. She must stir up this languid organ, make it perform its functions. As the blonde must fear an excess of fat, so the brunette has reason to fear an excess of bile. She should eat such juicy, acid fruit, as cherries, strawberries and grapes, and in the water she drinks it is well to add the juice of half a lemon to every glass of water.
The brunette should regard the lemon as her friend. It is a tonic for her stomach and her scalp. Half a lemon rubbed well upon the scalp cleanses it.
Her temperamental tendency is toward “the blues.” A blonde is more sanguine than a brunette. The brunette will correct her brown view of life by the same exercise and diet that goads the liver into activity.