Early beauty culturists preached the value of ‘toning’, ‘stimulating’ or ‘freshening’ the skin after purifying by using some form of skin tonic, skin freshener, or astringent. The products were extremely popular and remained so throughout the twentieth century. Originally skin tonics were regarded as just that, tonics for the skin. Like their historical family members, toilet waters, these were extremely varying in structure and frequently came with therapeutic says.
As with other makeup products, perfumes and medicinal aids, meals were published in beauty books, home encyclopaedias and magazines in the nineteenth and first twentieth century and would have been made up from formula purchased through local druggists or chemists. Sarah Bernhardt, who is well known on her behalf perennial youthfulness, attributes the seeming miracle entirely to special skin tonic that she favors. This eau sedative is said to have the effect of making the flesh firm and elastic, whilst whitening and strengthening your skin, and soothing the terrible “nerves” to which our twentieth-century womanhood seems ready prey.
The idea that pores and skin tonics could ‘relieve the nerves’ or ‘take the weakness out of worn-out muscles’ is not unusual for the time. Common ingredients found in skin tonics covered alcohol, witch hazel draw out, tincture of benzoin, tincture of sage, borax, and camphor. Pink appears to have been the favored coloring. Procedure: Dissolve the tincture of benzoin and perfume in the alcohol.
Warm the witchhazel and dissolve the boric acid solution in it. Mix the with hazel and the orange … Read more