Valeska Suratt

originally posted on September 19, 2024

Back with another article by Valeska, this time from the May 26, 1912 issue of The Commercial Tribune newspaper.

How Any Woman Can Defy Nature and Make Herself into a Queen of Beauty

By Miss Valeska Suratt, the World’s Greatest Exponent of Self-Made Beauty

Well my dear sisters, I almost fell as though I were going to make a confession. They say this is good for the soul. Any any rate, I feel certain thankfulness at being able to satisfy the longing of so many women for the priceless charm of beauty. I say priceless merely to indicate its great value and importance toe very woman, yet it is by no means priceless from the standpoint of money value. You may have these charms just as surely and definitely as you are reading this, and at little cost.

My first little chat will not be about things that you would not do anyhow. It will be about things that are simple; things you can’t forget; things that will require but a few moments of your time and which are merely in line with your ordinary toilet which you engage in every day in the year.

There will be no long-drawn-out rules affecting your mode of life. I am not going to tell you to bathe twice a day in warm water, I am not going to advise you to lie on your back on the hard floor and kick up your heels and flop your arms around in half an hour’s breathless labor; I am not going to pose as a food expert, denying you the food you like best. I am going to let you eat pickles if you want them. I am not going to pose as a doctor and talk about the internal organs, and say that if you are not in good health you cannot be beautiful. This is not true. If it were, then very, very few women in the world would ever be able to beautify themselves, for we are all more or less liable to bodily ills.

I am not going to tell you to keep your windows open at night two feet from the top with the thermometer way down to zero, and freeze your feet while putting a half hour’s pink color on the end of your nose.

You can eat candy, and drink all the ice water you want. In other words, I believe in sanity. At least, my dear sisters, off the stage.

I sometimes wonder whether or not I am really the one who has found a real source of beauty-making – it has all come so easily, so quickly, so promptly, almost as at the touch of a fairy wand.

Yet, if anyone is entitled to the fruits of great labor, I believe I am one. I studied and I worked. All that I had tried and used before were makeshifts and make-believes. I knew it, because when I would arise in the morning with hair disheveled, with drowsy eyes, and the ruby on my cheek had gone, and the pallor of the morning had come, all the work of the previous day had vanished and another day of struggling for twelve hours of beauty at the dressing table lay before me. Now the mornings have no terrors for me. The beauty work that I did yesterday, last week, last month, last year, still remains for today, tomorrow and the future. I live in peace and happiness with the beckoning world before me. They receive me with open arms and I love them.

Today I have picked out for you one of the most important of my beauty secrets, and I am sure if you will do exactly as I instruct you to do, you will in the next few weeks, say with me, Eureka! Then your heart will palpitate with mine, and you will know.

Most important to the average woman is how to get rid of those tell-tale signs of age, Father Time’s register, wrinkles! Volumes have been written upon the subject, but the only treatment worth while is the treatment that has done the work. Theories are valueless. I have used the following treatment for several years, after I gave up the old, threadbare advice that seemed to take an age to produce any result at all. I made up the treatment myself, and had several of my deserving friends use it. This was at the very beginning.

The result you will picture to yourself when I say that one elderly lady in particular, of 56, a good friend of mine in Philadelphia, began to use it a day or so before I left that city. I saw her again in a little over three weeks afterward, and I was so astonished I gasped. She confessed she had used nothing else but the treatment i gave her. She had had three or four deep wrinkles in her forehead, and crow’s feet that you could almost count clear across the room. These, to my wonderment, were almost gone! And the result on a few of my other friends has been invariably the same. Upon myself, the world has seen its results, and anyhow, I prefer not to talk about myself too much; I might grow a double chin.

Make up the treatment yourself as follows, obey instructions implicitly, and you will not be disappointed:

In a large bowl pour one-half pint boiling water. In this pour two tablespoonsful of glycerin. Place this bowl in a pan of water on a slow fire. In a few minutes add two ounces of eptol and continue stirring until all is dissolved. At first it will look like jelly, then it will start to cream. When it does this, remove it from the fire and stir constantly until cold. Then keep it in an air-tight jar. You should be able to get eptol at any good drug store and it should not cost you more than fifty cents. This will last quite a while.

Apply this cream every morning with the tips of the ten fingers, after you have washed your face thoroughly with warm water and soap. Plaster your face very liberally all over with it, around the eyes, on the forehead, on either side of the mouth, everywhere. After you have applied it, don’t merely rub your face all over as though you were handling a baby’s skin, but dig right in. Take up the flesh in your fingers and pinch it, squeeze it, roll it. Do this for a few minutes, until the cream disappears. Then apply your complexion powder. Do the same at night. Don’t look in the mirror every few hours to see if the wrinkles are going away; they’ll go away soon enough if you make up your mind to stick to it. This cream will not grow hair.

Next Sunday I will give you several of my other secrets, although today I could give you only one for lack of space. I will also answer in this column some of the personal inquiries I have received in the mail. But it’s simple, isn’t it? And it is just as wonderful as it is simple! Inquiries should be address to me in person, care of this newspaper.