5 Great Skincare Tips (From 100 Years Ago)

Beautiful skin. It's not a vanity to desire it.
In fact, doing whatever you can to get it
may very well be God's will. Marie
Montaigne explains in 1913's How to be
Beautiful:
Almost while I was writing this, a learned
Presbyterian minister reminded the sisters
of his flock about the loveliness of flowers
and admonished them that women were
the flowers of the human family, and,
therefore, that it was a woman's sacred
duty to do everything she could to enhance
her beauty and so confer upon the world
the pleasure in the gift of a human
blossom. [How to be Beautiful]
In 1913, many women were also the cows,
pack-mules, kangaroos, and brood sows of
the human family. Though it may be
difficult to maintain your blossom while
constantly pregnant, caring for six children,
driving a plow, and hand-washing the
clothing of an entire family while elbow-
deep in lye, it is not impossible. A true
woman can surely manage it!
Here, some helpful skin-care tips from 100
years ago.
1. Avoid the salad oil
To nourish the skin on your face, Dr.
William A. Woodbury, dermatologist and
author of 1910's Beauty Culture: A Practical
Handbook on the Care of the
Person, prescribes a mix of lard, lanolin,
boric acid, and white wax. Ms. Montaigne,
however, sees no need for such harsh
ingredients. Furthermore, she cautions
against what can happen if you use the
wrong skin food.
An important thing to consider in the
selection of skin foods is their tendency to
darken the skin or make it hairy… Salad oil,
unless made from pure olives, will make
the skin hairy, while pure olive extracts will
not. [How to be Beautiful]
Perhaps using salad oil on your skin never
occurred to you in the first place. Good! It,
like impure thoughts, causes unwanted hair
growth. Avoid at all costs. However, dairy
products may be just the thing!
Sour milk or that which has curdled, is very
whitening to face and neck. Mixed with
cornmeal it cannot be surpassed as a
softening bleach for the skin. [How to be
Beautiful]
You can be one of those rare human
blossoms that smell like curdled milk. God's
skunk cabbage.
2. Don't move
If you believe that wrinkles are an
unavoidable part of aging, sister, you're just
making excuses. You have wrinkles for two
reasons. One, you didn't rub your face
correctly, and two, you will not control your
emotions. Why can't you be more like the
Turks?
According to Beauty's Aids, a book written
in 1901 by the anonymous Countess C__:
The most simple and most effective way to
avoid the appearance of lines, is to try as
far as possible to keep an immobile face —
that immobility which amongst the Arabs
and the Turks preserves for so long the
purity of their skin. And it is the same even
in our country. Many unimpressionable
women are such mistresses of their nerves
that nothing surprises them or troubles
them, they remain always serene, never
crying, never laughing, hardly smiling, until
they reach that stage of force of will, that
they prevent their passions from showing
in their faces. [Beauty's Aids]
Faces aren't for feelings, dear. If they were,
what would you bottle up inside, enabling
you to build enough wrenching inner
turmoil to keep your figure trim? Hmm?
But if you insist on being so gauche as to
have visible emotions, you have the option
of a facial "massage." From The Countess:
The cheek muscles… are manipulated with
a clawing motion which must be light and
quick; not pinching. This will fill out hollow
cheeks, while it gives firmness to the
tissues and banishes the tell-tale lines of
worry. [Beauty's Aids]
Presumably to be replaced by the tell-tale
signs of clawing your own face daily.
3. Be good for beauty's sake
According to Daniel Garrison Brinton and
George Henry Napheys, who
wrote Personal Beauty: How to Cultivate
and Preserve it in Accordance with the
Laws of Health in 1870, the placement of
wrinkles reveal your inner soul. And you
can prove this theory simply by
electrocuting a corpse.
Connect the poles of an electric battery
with these separate muscles on the face of
a corpse, and you will see the ghastly
spectacle of the passions of rage, of mirth,
of lust, of hate, one after another brought
into horrid relief on the countenance of
death. The habitual use of one of these
muscles above the other, enlarges it, and
leaves on the countenance marks which
observers ever associate with the passion.
[Personal Beauty: How to Cultivate and
Preserve it in Accordance with the Laws of
Health]
4. Stock up on hog's lard
The anonymous Countess C__ gives serious
consideration to many injurious skin
conditions: carbuncles, blackheads, warts,
and, of course, freckles.
These spots, which are ordinarily called
freckles, and by the learned, ephelis, are
the horror of blondes, red-haired, and dark
people, with a fine white skin. How do they
come? Medici certant — the doctors
disagree, said one of my friends, a Latin
scholar. Are they a sign of an excess of iron
in the system? Do they denote an anaemic
temperament, a feeble circulation? No one
knows. However they come, they are very
disagreeable for those who are afflicted
with them. Fortunately it is possible to
prevent them, and, as a rule, one can get
rid of them. [Beauty's Aids]
Modern times tell us, of course, that
freckles actually denote a lack of soul. Still,
the Countess then offers a variety of
recipes, principle ingredients including
turpentine, hog's lard, and acetate of lead.
It may seem drastic, but it's a small price to
pay to be able to walk amongst the normals
without having the blackness of your heart
speckled all over your face.
5. Make your own dimples
The Skin: Its Care and Treatment by Emily
Lloyd is a turn-of-the-century study manual
for women considering becoming "beauty
operators." Most of the book is dedicated
to instruction on how to use what appears
to be a car battery to electrically stimulate a
client's face. (A live client this time,
presumably).
The sections on cosmetic surgery, though
detailed, do indicate that a professional
surgeon should be called upon. However,
an operator can make dimples for her
client, all by herself. All you need is a very
sharp knife, a hook and some scissors.
After the skin has been carefully cleansed
the sharp point of a very fine knife is
carried into the cellular and fatty tissue of
the cheek, and then these tissues drawn up
with a very sharp hook and snipped off.
The amount of tissue excised is hard to
describe as it will depend largely upon the
location selected, also upon the style of a
dimple preferred. [The Skin: Its Care and
Treatment]
You don't think Shirley Temple was born
with those dimples, do you? Only her
beauty operator knows for sure.