Woman Beautiful, The

Now days we take cosmetics for granted. You find them in every drug store, discount store, convenience store, beauty salon, etc. But less than a century ago, commercial cosmetics were not that easy to obtain and were high priced. So what did the women of our grandmother's era do? This book reveals their secrets, home-made recipes, and the lost connection between health, grace and beauty.

From the Author:

The Woman Beautiful is not a radiant creature of gorgeous plumage and artificial beauty, but a woman of wholesome health, good hard sense, sparkling vivacity and sweet lovableness. Her beauty-creed hangs not from rouge pots and bleaches, but suspends like a banner of truth from the laws of wise, hygienic living.

Her cheeks are tinted with the glow that comes from good, well-circulated blood, her eyes are bright and lovely because her mind is so, and her complexion is transparent and soft and velvety for the reason that the true art is known to her.

The Woman Beautiful is all sincerity. She doesn't like to sail under false colors and so insult old Dame Nature, whose kindnesses and benefits are so well meant and freely offered.

EXCERPT

Bad complexions cause more heartaches than crushed ambitions and cases of sudden poverty. The reason is plain. Ordinary troubles roll away from the mind of a cheery, energetic woman like water from a duck's back, but beauty worries-well! they have the most amazingly insistent way of sticking to one. You may say you won't think of them, but you do just the same.

It was always thus, and thus it always will be.

Diogenes searched untiringly for an honest man-so they say. Woman, bless her dear, ambitious heart, seeks with unabating energy the ways and means of becoming beautiful.

After all, they're not so hard to find when once the secret of it is known. Like the keys and things rattling about in her undiscoverable pocket, they're right with her. If she will but stop her fretting for a moment, sit down and think, then gird on her armor and begin the task-why, that's all that's needed.

There are three great rules for beauty. The first is diet, the second bathing, and the third exercise. All can be combined in the one word health. But, alas! how few of us have come into the understanding of correct living! It is woman's impulse-so I have found-to buy a jar of cream and expect a miracle to be worked on a bad complexion in one brief night.

How absurd, when the cause of the worry may be a bad digestion, impure blood or general lack of vitality! One might just as well expect a corn plaster to cure a bad case of pneumonia, or an eye lotion to remedy locomotor ataxia. The cream may struggle bravely and heal the little eruptions for a day or so, but how can it possibly effect a permanent cure when the cause flourishes like a blizzard at Medicine Hat or a steam radiator in the first warm days of April?

CONTENTS