Beauty

Article #2: Beauty by Dr. Herbert M. Shelton

Hygiene Of Beauty

If there is any truth in the recapitulation hypothesis of the evolutionists, certainly the predominance of beauty in the young indicates that, primitively, the race was beautiful. Only as the child merges into adolescence and the adolescent merges into maturity do the evidences of his primitive beauty give way to the ugliness (deformity) that has overtaken the race. We watch a feature or several features gradually become faulty and become more and more exaggerated until positive ugliness is produced. A nose remains flat or becomes too prominent; the cheek bones are sunken or too prominent; the chin either fails to develop or develops too much; the mouth becomes awry, the nose develops lopsidedly; the breasts either fail to develop normally or they become too large; spinal curvature shows up, one leg is longer than the other; defective vision or defective hearing develops.

Not all of these defects are due to heredity. Some are positively the outgrowths of faulty nutrition; others are the result of faulty use of the body, or a lack of exercise, sunshine and other causes of disease. Failure of breast development is an evidence of endocrine deficiency and this is probably most often due to nutritional inadequacies. Large, pendulous breasts represent the accumulation of fat in the breasts and this grows out of food excesses. Heavy hips, heavy breasts and bulging abdomen are three of the most common figure faults of women and these represent physical indolence and nutritive redundancy. The woman who develops a moustache or a beard may, in most cases, perhaps rightly blame this development, not upon her ancestors, but. upon her own endocrine deficiencies growing out of her own wrong ways of life. Ugliness grows as much out of our unHygienic way of life as out of our dysgenic mating.

These deformities and defects cannot be corrected by any external applications. Paints and powders, nylons and silks, jewels and showy objects of various sorts, are all vain and useless so far as the real beautification of the person is concerned. This object can be accomplished only by what Trail called the “cosmetics of the heart and daily life.” He advised: “purify and elevate, and harmonize the affections, live nobly, justly, and generously, and observe all the physiological laws that govern the health of the body, and you will need no other cosmetics.” So long as we attempt to substitute make-up and grooming for observance of the laws that govern life, we cannot hope to make any real progress towards genuine beauty. Drugs and operations do not remove the causes of ugliness, hence they can be of no value.

There are various reasons for associating ugliness with biological “inferiority;” the term “ugly” can also be understood, in its relations to plants, animals and man as meaning biologically abnormal and unfit. Lack of beauty can result from a lack of good health in the part and in the whole organism. Deformity of the lower limbs can indicate lack of health in the locomotive system; a bad complexion indicates no less a lack in the vital system. The highest degree of physiological excellence requires symmetry and coordination in every part, mirroring a wholesome balance of capacities. Deformities, deficiencies and superfluities are not only incompatible with beauty, but with high efficiency in function.