southern Arabs
drop hot grease from a candle on a bride's fingers, and then plaster the
fingers with henna. Then the grease is taken off, and light-colored
spots (if possible, regular) are left where it was, while the rest of
the skin is colored brown by the henna. They put on the bride seventeen
garments, a silk one and a muslin one alternately; then a mantle over
all, and a rug on the mantle, and all possible ornaments.[401] Flinders
Petrie thinks that we must recognize a principle of "racial taste,"
"which belongs to each people as much as their language, which may be
borrowed like languages from one race by another, but which survives
changes and long eclipses even more than language."[402] The cases given
show that ideals of beauty are somehow formed, which call for a
deformation of the human body. The foreheads are flattened, the lips
enlarged, the ears drawn down, the skull forced into a sugar-loaf shape,
the nose flattened, etc., to try to reach a form approved by fashion.
There is an ideal of beauty behind the fashion, a selected type of
superiority, which must be assumed as the purpose of the fashion.

+190. Fashion in other things than dress.+ As will appear below, fashion
controls many things besides dress. It governs the forms of utensils,
weapons, canoes and boats, tools, etc., amongst savages. In the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there was a fashionable attitude or
pose in standing for women, in which the abdomen was thrown forward. It
is often seen in pictures and portraits.[403] It is inelegant and
destitute of meaning. The Venetians were luxurious and frivolous,
jealous and distrustful of women, and fond of pleasure and fashion. From
the end of the sixteenth century a shopkeeper in the Merceria adopted a
custom of showing the new fashions of Paris on Ascension Day by means of
a life-size doll dressed in them.[404] The Venetian women of that period
wore patins, shoes with blocks underneath, some of which were two feet
high. The women were unable to walk without a maid on each side to
support them.[405] Yriarte thinks that these patins were due to the
policy of the husbands. When an ambassador, in conversation with the
doge and his counselors, said that shoes would be far more convenient, a
counselor replied, "Only too convenient! Only too much so!" Under the
French Directory, a _demi-terme_ was the name of a framework worn by
women to look as if they would soon be mothers.[406] Thirty years ago
"po