Kallos, a Treatise on the Scientific Culture of Personal Beauty and the Cure of Ugliness

Abstract

THE author desires his book to be taken seriously. He shows that good looks and manners have a commercial value, since those are more likely to succeed in obtaining the prizes of life who can make favourable first impressions than those who cannot. The first start greatly depends on patronage, and obscure youths who have won wealth and position have almost always been helped by their good looks, good address, and good voice. These are aids of considerable importance to every candidate, whether it be for a place behind a counter or for the suffrages of a constituency. The author considers from a medical point of view how ill-favoured individuals may palliate their defects. He treats ugliness as a disease, classifying its various forms and indicating such remedies as he can. His classes are coarseness, thinness, obesity, vulgarity, wrinkles, defects of circulation, of complexion, and of the hair. Then he takes the features in detail, eyes, nose, mouth, &c. His recipes are not numerous. We learn incidentally that what is sold as lime juice and glycerine for the hair contains no glycerine at all, and that a very popular dressing is castor oil and rum. This would have harmonised with the toilette of the Syrian beauty of old times, whose “garments smelt of myrrh, aloes, and cassia,” a very apothecary-like fragrance. The book does not contain practical advice of much novelty, but its interest chiefly lies in directing attention to much that we already know but are too apt to forget; such as that dissipation, gross feeding, and indolent ways create ugliness of various forms. We know there are bad schools where the boys are slouching, ill complexioned, furtive in expression, and generally ugly, and we also know that there are good schools where, owing to healthy habits and keen and varied interests, the boys are bright, vivacious, and attractive. Similar differences due to different habits of life exist in men; they are preeminently shown by the good effect of drill on a ploughboy or street lounger. We may be sure that those who habitually cultivate a healthy mind in a healthy body, and who study how to please, cannot fail to add to the total happiness of the world and to secure for themselves a better chance of succeeding in it than their more negligent rivals.