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Show Hair Powder. (Gentleman's Magazine.) Powder for the hair seems to have died out about the end of the last century when. the scarcity of flour combined with Pitt's tax on powder In 1795 caused a complete change in the appearance of both sexes, though individuals here and there in fashionable circles had for some years left it off, the ladles partly from artistic influences and admiration of the portraits with natural hair and simple dress. Walpole's remark on the result of wig3 and powder being discarded strikes one at first as very strange; he says that "all individuality is confounded by people wearing their own hair." We shouQd now say exactly the contrary; and then we Should remember that differences are more easily detected when the setting is one to Which we are accustomed, just as at first members of a foreign nation, to eyes unaccustomed to them, bear a strange resemblance to each other, though to themselves seeming to differ so much. Some years ago, in east London, when an English sailor was stabbed by a Chinaman, China-man, the murderer got off scot-free, as the English witnesses could not swear to one who appeared to be the exact ditto of all his compatriots; his "individuality was counf ounded !" Early in 1795, just before powder went out the Hull Advertiser notices that "London and the circumjacent counties of Middlesex, Surrey and Kent have already al-ready produced for hair powder licenses no less than f 100,000, half the sum at which the aggregate of the tax throughout through-out Great Britain was estimated. The number of hair powder certificates' granted grant-ed in this town (Hull) is nearly 1,000." |