At the start of the 1920’s according to ‘Virtue’s Household Physician° ‘Beautiful eyes should be large and full. The lashes healthy and long, the eyebrows almost straight across the forehead.’ To maintain their beauty eyes were to be washed with hot water at night, ideally with some borax added (borax can cause eye irritation).
Fat faced women were noted to have small eyes, which was considered undesirable so women were encouraged to massage or have their cheeks massaged regularly to reduce the fatty cheeks.
Shadows under the eyes were considered to be a sign that a woman was ‘delicate’, typically due to having a ‘bad liver.’ With time the under-eye-shadow would develop into ‘bags’ but it was claimed that eating apples would stop this happening.
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°Virtue’s Household Physician – A Twentieth Century Medica’ which was published in London in 1926 and claimed to be ‘a practical description in plain language of all the diseases of men, women and children with the latest discoveries in medicine and most approved methods of treatment by a corps of eminent specialists, practicing physicians and surgeons’ p. 1163.