The craze for beauty has also resulted in the tremendous rise of the beauty parlor. It is easy to remember the time when our largest cities could boast of but five or ten hair-dressing establishments. Today in the Boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx alone there are 1,177 hair-dressing establishments. Here women come not only for massages and permanent waves but also, frequently, for the treatment of diseases of the skin and for the removal of superfluous hair, moles, warts, or tumors. These beauty parlors are the outgrowth, in many instances, of manufacturing establishments for the sale of cosmetics. Here cold cream masquerades under twenty different names and women purchase for considerable sums preparations which cannot possibly do the things that are claimed for them. One finds “rose leaf cleansers,” “skin fresheners,” “face moulding creams,” “balsam tissue astringents,” “skin fatteners” and “skin thinners,” cleansing creams and vanishing creams, regardless of the fact that specialists in the disease of the skin have stated again and again that all that any cream can accomplish is simply to make the skin more pliable. MAGIC OF PLASTIC SURGERY REPLACES SCARRING KNIFE During the World War the mutilating injuries suffered by many of the men were assuaged through the development of new features in surgical technique. Whereas formerly it was considered sufficient merely to sew up a wound, to amputate a shattered limb or to save life regardless of appearance, surgeons then began to consider operations with a view to the most presentable appearance possible after repair. The technique itself is difficult but the war yielded a few masters in the medical service of each of the warring nations. _Stitching and Filling In._--In addition to making wounds more sightly by fine stitching, methods were evolved for filling in defects by transplanting tissues from points elsewhere in the body. For instance, a wound under the eye was repaired by moving some of the loose tissue from the forehead or the cheek. This was left attached to its original blood supply until new vessels had come in and then the original attachment or pedicle was removed. In one instance tissue taken from the upper part of the chest filled in the side of the face. Here mutilations were made sightly and at least a tolerable existence given to men whose lives otherwise might have been an agony of sensitiveness. _Transplanting Muscles._--In one case a man whose arm was lost at the shoulder had not even enough of a stump to attach an artificial limb. By transplanting muscles and tendons from neighboring parts, surgeons were able to make a stump that served well for the attachment of an artificial limb with which the man was able to earn a livelihood. The economic aspects of the situation are, of course, even more important than those relating wholly to the patient’s appearance. BUTTON IN SAVAGE’S SKULL FIRST PLASTIC SURGERY