A great object of importance, of care to every lady, is the care of her complexion. There is nothing more pleasing to the eye than a delicate, smooth skin; and besides being pleasing to the eye. Lovely skin is an evidence of health, and gives additional grace to the most regular features.It not merely acts as an organ of sense, and a protection to the surface of the body, but it clothes it, as it were, in a garment of the most delicate texture and of the most surpassing loveliness.
In perfect health, it is gifted with exquisite sensibility, and while it possesses the softness of velvet, and exhibits the delicate hues of the lily, the carnation, and the rose, it is nevertheless gifted with extraordinary strength and power of resisting external injury, and is not only capable of repairing, but of actually renewing itself.
Warmth and light help with a complexion of health and vigour
The importance of the due exposure of the body to daylight or sunlight cannot be too strongly insisted on. Light and warmth are powerful agents in the economy of our being. The former especially is an operative agent on which health, vigor, and even beauty itself, depend.
Withdraw the light of the sun from the organic world, and all its various beings and objects would languish and gradually lose those charms which are now their characteristics. In its absence, the carnation tint leaves the cheek of beauty, the cherry hue of the lips changes to a leaden-purple, the eyes become glassy and expressionless, and the complexion assumes an unnatural, cadaverous appearance that speaks of sickness, night and death. So powerful is daylight, so necessary to our well-being, that even its partial exclusion, or its insufficient admission to our apartments, soon tells its tale in the feeble health, the liability to the attacks of disease, and the pallid features (vacant and sunken, or flabby, pendent and uninviting) of their inmates.
Even the rooms in which we pass most of our time, and the number and extent of their windows, is perceptible, by the trained eye, in the complexion and features of those that occupy them. So in the vegetable world—the bright and endlessly varied hues of flowers, and their sweet perfumes—even their very production—depend on sunlight. In obscure light, plants grow lanky and become pale and feeble. They seldom produce flowers, and uniformly fail to ripen their seeds. In even partial darkness, the green hue of their foliage gradually pales and disappears, and new growth that may appear are blanched or colorless.