Beautifying the Complexion~ A Cautionary Tale

BEAUTIFYING THE COMPLEXION

Alletta would have been a very pretty girl, but for the dark freckles that sprinkled her whole face over. Her arms were as white as snow, but it made her angry to even look in the glass at herself. The whole study of her life became how to rid herself of her freckles. She tried one specific after another, but the only effect seemed to be to turn her once soft skin into parchment. She next tried to cover the freckles up with enamels and powders, and in this she was more successful. But the trouble and expense was so great that she could not "make herself up" more than once a day. So for the remainder of the time she must be invisible. This was particularly troublesome, as Alletta's parents were by no means rich. Her hard-working mother did her own housework, and a great deal of sewing for her pampered daughter besides.

With all Letty's skill, she could not make her painting look exactly like fair flesh and blood. There was an unnatural glisten to the white surface, that told plainly that it was artificial. To disguise this, she always wore the thickest veils that fashion would permit, and in the most suffocating August days never ventured to raise it for a breath of fresh air. She could never enjoy the luxury of a cool laving of her face in water after she was "made up" She even slept with that crust on her skin, under the fancy that it would improve her complexion.

"You will be pale enough to suit you after awhile," said a friend, " if you continue to use white lead as a cosmetic! White in death, or from paralysis."

But Letty would not heed any warnings. She was fully enslaved by her folly. Her skin came at last to look, when just washed, like a cracked cast of plaster of Paris, she was about to be married to a young man—whom she had taken great care never to meet except in the evening—when she was stricken down with paralysis, and is now a helpless burden on the hands of her mother.

There have been many similar examples of the effects of these cosmetics, and girls may far better endure the ills of a poor complexion than run such risks in their attempts to beautify it. 

source: Arthur's Home Notes, Volume 41, 1873

~white lead had been used from antiquity up until the 1800s as a means for whitening the skin...