A very amusing letter in yesterday's Pall Mall, from "
A Lady of a Certain Age," describes a new dodge for getting timid women to buy " specifics," for effecting nothing, at an enormous cost. The lady went, according to her own account, to a fashionable hairdresser's at a fashionable watering-place. While her hair was being combed or cat, the young man in attendance started, asked her if she was aware her hair would be quite grey in three months, applied a magnifying glass, and assured her again that such would be inevitably the result ; but, he added kindly, that an immediate application of one of his specifics —specific No. 2 — would arrest and prevent this disaster, specific No. 2 costing from 7s. 6d. to a guinea a bottle. While she was still there a very young lady came in. A "still taller and more dignified person " was appointed to operate upon her hair,—and nerves,—and she was threatened with speedy baldness if she did not apply specific No. 1, price a guinea. In another fashionable hairdresser's shop of the same town to which, after this experience, our heroine went from laudable curiosity, she and a friend were threatened with precisely similar results—magnifying- glasses being as before applied to their hair, and pseudo-scientific nonsense talked about it by the young men. The lady adds that these hairdresser's attendants get a fourth of the price of what- ever cosmetics of the kind they sell.
Previous page
