COSMETICS
Since investigation has been undertaken by physicians and chemists there is less and less likelihood of the sale or purchase of cosmetic preparations, including face creams, powders and lotions, containing poisonous ingredients, although at one time such metallic poisons as lead, bismuth, or arsenic could be found as ingredients of such beautifiers. Nowadays, the difficulty seems to be that there are a multiplicity of preparations which have no real warrant, since they differ only in unessential qualities from each other. There are, for example, dozens of creams sold for application to the skin with claims that they nourish the skin, when, as a matter of fact, there is no such thing as a skin food. All of these creams essentially are cold creams, modified by varying amounts of perfumes or other thinning or thickening factors.
These statements do not apply, however, to the creams that are used as depilatories. Most of the widely advertised ointments for this purpose have as their basis a salt of the metal barium. Application of the ointment removes the hair, but does not affect the growing end within the skin. In most instances the new growth of hair is thicker and coarser and darker than the original growth removed by the depilatory. In some instances, superfluous hair is removed by the application of the X-ray. It has been found, however, that X-ray machines seldom kill the living cell from which the hair grows, unless it is applied in dosage so strong as to produce definite changes in the skin itself.
Specialists in diseases of the skin are being called on to treat thickening of the skin, or so-called precancerous keratosis, resulting from the use of the X-ray for the removal of hair by inexperienced persons. Those who give special attention to these problems are agreed that the one certain method of removal of superfluous hair is the use of the electric needle. It must be understood, however, that it is possible to remove only a few hairs at a single treatment, and that the method requires great expertness in its application.