74 COSMETICS. 



English climate. Our fair sex are not celebrated for the 

 profusion of their hair, in that respect there is hardly a 

 peasant-girl of France, Italy, Spain, or Germany that would 

 not have the advantage ; but English ladies' hair is usually of 

 admirable quality soft and silky, a condition indispensable 

 to the formation and maintenance of pleasing ringlets. Hair 

 may be easily too long for this style of adornment : foreign 

 women's hair is usually too long. Moreover, the moisture of 

 the English climate promotes just that degree of rigidity in 

 the helix twist which is indispensable to beauty. Mostly, 

 when a continental lady emulates the boucles Anglaises, the 

 result is not satisfactory. The ringlets are prone to assume a 

 certain corkscrew aspect, hard, and the reverse of pleasing. 



Coming now to the discipline of the hair, the method or 

 methods of keeping it in order, I believe the more it feels the 

 touch of atmospheric air the better for its condition. The 

 magnificent masses of hair to be seen on the heads of foreign 

 peasant-girls, who never wear bonnets or other head-covering, 

 is a standing proof of the soundness of this doctrine. Con- 

 versely, again, who can have failed to remark the tendency to 

 baldness which any persistent covering of the head induces I 

 Look at barristers men whom precedent and tradition com- 

 pel to smother their pericranium in an investiture of powdered 

 horsehair see how bald they tend to be, how bald they 

 mostly are. I would advise a barrister entering his profession 

 with a good head of hair, to have it powdered and got-up 

 horsehair-wig fashion. 



Is there any cure for baldness when it has become con- 

 firmed? Are those elixirs, those balms of Gilead, those 

 rosemary essences, and other things which hair-dressers talk 

 to one about in such bland persuasive tones, are they 

 fact or are they delusion? And what shall we say about 

 bear's-grease, that was once held in such repute, and the 

 hair-producing character of which still lingers, as did the 

 odour of flowers to Tommy Moore's broken vase ? Delusions 



