SKIN DISEASE QUACKERY
Faith springs eternal in the human breast and credulity is not the property of any single class. One finds our best educated citizens just as easily susceptible to false and fraudulent claims as the most ignorant. Indeed, in many instances, particularly in relation to medical science, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, since its possessor is likely to be impressed with his own ability to make suitable judgments.
Of particular interest in this connection are the many cosmetics offered to women who seek eternally for artificial beauty. According to an investigation recently made, the American public paid, in 1921, $150,000,000 for perfumery and cosmetics. There were purchased 240,000,000 packages of talcum and face powders and 18,000,000 packages of rouge.
Students of diseases of the skin constantly emphasize the difficulty of determining the nature of any eruption. Red spots and slight inflammations may be due to disturbances of digestion, to special sensitivity to various food substances, to eczema, to any one of a half-dozen infections, and possibly to tuberculosis or to syphilis.
Since the tendency of some minor conditions is to recover without treatment, persons are likely to indulge in self-treatment and thus to neglect the more serious complaints to a time when a cure is far more difficult than when they are seen early. Cancer of the skin appears in its beginning as a small and rather unnoticeable spot; if seen early, it is easily controlled, but if stimulated by the use of all sorts of caustic acids or pastes it may become so serious as to produce death.
The craze for beauty has also resulted in the tremendous rise of the beauty parlor. It is easy to remember the time when our largest cities could boast of but five or ten hair-dressing establishments. Today in the Boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx alone there are 1,177 hair-dressing establishments. Here women come not only for massages and permanent waves but also, frequently, for the treatment of diseases of the skin and for the removal of superfluous hair, moles, warts, or tumors.
These beauty parlors are the outgrowth, in many instances, of manufacturing establishments for the sale of cosmetics. Here cold cream masquerades under twenty different names and women purchase for considerable sums preparations which cannot possibly do the things that are claimed for them.
One finds “rose leaf cleansers,” “skin fresheners,” “face moulding creams,” “balsam tissue astringents,” “skin fatteners” and “skin thinners,” cleansing creams and vanishing creams, regardless of the fact that specialists in the disease of the skin have stated again and again that all that any cream can accomplish is simply to make the skin more pliable.