BEAUTY CULTURE is the science of improving personal appearance. It embraces the care of the skin, the hair, the hands and nails, the teeth and the body, to make them conform to the standard regarded by the current generation as beautiful.
Since earliest times, cosmetics have played a part in the social life of civilization. To-day, specialists in beauty culture employ diet, exercise, hygiene, electricity, X-ray, radium, gland stimula tion and gland extracts, water cures, sun-treatments, plastic sur gery, massage, osteopathy and mental science to create health and beauty.
However, hygiene, sunshine, mental science, etc., constitute only a background for the specialized work of the beauty culturist. Largely, and in actual practice, beauty culture is "the application of cosmetic preparations to the human body by massaging, strok ing, kneading, slapping, tapping, stimulating, manipulating, exer cising, cleansing, or by means of devices, apparatus or appliances, and arranging, dressing, marcelling, curling, waving, cleansing, singeing, bleaching, colouring, dyeing, tinting or otherwise treating by any means the hair of any person." This inclusive definition is quoted from the Illinois law which requires that anyone who practises beauty culture have a certificate of registration.
The report of the census of manufactures of the department of commerce shows the value of perfumery, cosmetics and toilet preparations manufactured in the United States in 1914 to have been something over $25,000,000. In 1925, the year of the most recent published report, the figures are over $147,000,000.