If commenced in youth, thick lips may be reduced by compression, and thin linear ones are easily modified by suction.  This draws the blood to the surfaces, and produces at first a temporary and, later, a permanent inflation.  It is a mistaken belief that biting the lips reddens them.  The skin of the lips is very thin, rendering them extremely susceptible to organic derangement, and if the atmosphere does not cause chaps or parchment, the result of such harsh treatment will develop into swelling or the formation of scars.  Above all things, keep a sweet breath.

Everybody can not have beautiful hands, but there is no plausible reason for their being ill kept.  Red hands may be overcome by soaking the feet in hot water as often as possible.  If the skin is hard and dry, use tar or oat-meal soap, saturate them with glycerine, and wear gloves in bed.  Never bathe them in hot water, and wash no oftener than is necessary.  There are dozens of women with soft, white hands who do not put them in water once a month.  Rubber gloves are worn in making the toilet, and they are cared for by an ointment of glycerine and rubbed dry with chamois-skin or cotton flannel.  The same treatment is not unfrequently applied to the face with the most successful results.  If such methods are used, it would be just as well to keep the knowledge of it from the gentlemen.  We know of one beautiful lady who has not washed her face for three years, yet it is always clean, rosy, sweet and kissable.  With some of her other secrets she gave it to her lover for safe keeping.  Unfortunately, it proved to be her last gift to that gentleman, who declared in a subsequent note that “I can not reconcile my heart and my manhood to a woman who can get along without washing her face.”

SOME OF THE SECRETS OF BEAUTY.

There is as much a “fashion” in complexion as there is in bonnets or boots.  Sometimes nature is the mode, sometimes art.  Just now the latter is in the ascendant, though, as a rule, only in that inferior phase which has not reached the “concealment of art”—­the point where extremes meet and the perfection of artifice presents all the appearance of artlessness.  No one of an observant turn of mind, who is accustomed to the sight of English maids and matrons, can deny that making-up, as at present practiced, partakes of the amateurish element.  Impossible reds and whites grow still more impossibly red and white from week to week under the unskilled hands of the wearer of “false colors,” who does not like to ask for advice on so delicate a subject, for, even were she willing to confess to the practice, the imputation of experience conveyed in the asking for counsel might be badly received, and would scarcely be in good taste.