The Fools of Fashion

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 9, 1872

The Fools of Fashion.

THE following from the Louisville Ledger shows how some of the miserably besotted devotees of fashion attempt to improve upon nature, and the results they reap from so doing. These results are all right. Let insulted nature vindicate her violated laws; and no matter how severe are her penalties, the decision of every sensible mind will be that just and true are her ways.

“A lady in Louisville paid $75, we are told, for having her face enameled for the ball given at the Galt House for the Grand Duke Alexis. The enameling was warranted to last three days, and so it did. The lady was taken ill upon her return home from the ball, her face became greatly swollen, the most acute pain succeeded, and it was only by the employment of the best medical skill that her life was saved. This statement we have from an undoubted source.

“But the case of this lady is not so bad as that of another Louisville lady who became enamored of the odious fashion of enameling the face. She visited another city, far to the eastward, some months ago, for the sole purpose of having her face enameled according to the latest Parisian mode. She had heard that a noted Parisian was engaged in the enameling business at the city in question, and to him she went upon her arrival. For the sum of $500 he agreed to enamel her face so scientifically that the enamel would remain undamaged for three years, and a year or two longer if extra care was taken in washing the face according to its prescribed method. The devotee of fashion concluded the bargain, and paid $300 of the sum named, the balance to be paid in yearly installments, divided into three years,

“The lady received the enamel and returned to her home in this city. Since her return she has disappeared from society. There was so much poison in the enamel that its effects were almost immediately developed in the almost total paralysis of the facial nerves, and what was once a truly beautiful face, is now a distorted, disfigured and ulcerous one.

“The lady’s beauty has disappeared forever, and if her physicians succeed in saving her life they will have accomplished more than they had a right to hope for. Her eyes are terribly inflamed and disfigured, and the sight of them fast failing.”