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Westport Times, Volume II, Issue 203, 25 March 1868, Page 3

The Skin and the Use op Cosmetics. —Such being the skin—so highly organised, so delicate, so multifarious an organism, so wonderfully made, one having so many things to do —is it reasonable to think we can abuse the skin by laying on pigments at random with impunity? Believe me, not. If I touch a wasp with a drop of oil, the wasp soon dies suffocated. Breathing wholly by apertures through the skin, the oil fills up those apertures, and the insect dies in consequence. We human beings are not so badly off as that. We have lungs to breathe with though wasps have not; hence nothing laid upon the skin to occlude our skin pores would have the effect of suffocating us suddenly. The use of such is very prejudicial nevertheless, and should ever be borne in mind, when the tise of skin cosmetics is contemplated. This is not the worst that may happen. The human organism may not only be injured through painting or varnishing large portions of the skin, so that it can no longer breathe or transpire; another injury may come through the further evil of injurious things absorbed and taken into the system. Thus, to take an imaginary case, if perchance the fashion should ever dawn and come into vogue of rubbing blue mercurial ointment upon the skin, in the interests of promoting some imaginary beauty, the effect would soon be death through salivation. Such a case is impossible; since the time of the ancient Britons nobody in this country has been thought the more handsome for being painted blue. Still, the assumption is not valueless. Though mercurial preparations be not used as skin-pigments, they are frequently used—and worse, arsenic —as depilatories applied to the skin to accomplish the removal of superfluous hair. In this way the result has frequently been injurious ; in some cases fatal. Lead preparations again, are to be guarded against solicitously. Painters who get smeared with white-lead, printers who handle printing-types (the metal of which is partly lead), plumbers and smelters and others much concerned in handling the metal lead, or its compounds, are ever subject to incur that frightful disease lead-colic and palsy. I myself knew a printer who died from this cause. These facts may serve to fix on the miud the care with which lead applications should be regarded. Occasionally flake-white, which is no other than white-lead, has been used to impart whiteness to the skin. The practice is dangerous, beyond my power to reprobate. Suffering, up to torture the most awful, ending in death, is always imminent. Another reprehensible custom, involving the cosmetic use of a lead compound, is the following : —Upon the face or other visible skin a pimple is seen or other eruption ; whereupon, at the instigation of some old woman who cures with simples—using nothing strong a wash of Goulard water is applied again and again. Now Goulard water is none else than a soluble preparation of lead, adapted in the highest degree to the absorbent capacity of the skin. It is absorbed into the system, and evil effects arise, few knowing whence they come.— Professor Scoffern.