Building on this sense of homemade exploration, many American women experimented with their own kinds of cure-alls and beauty secrets. In a common cookbook, one could expect to find recipes for lip balm and chocolate chip cookies lying side by side. Beauty fell in the realm of household utility and became another part of the community of women who would share their recipes and goods with neighbors. Much like the oral traditions of the past, these remedies would be passed down through word of mouth through generations leaving their own stamp and altering the product into a sense of perfection.

Many of these cures also brought in the sense of magical and superstituous use of unique herbs and other strange concoctions. One special recipe illustrates this by instructing readers to, "gather May dew (considered the purest of waters) or invoke the curative powers of the spring by insisting on strawberry-water, frog-spawn water, the juice from birch saplings, or the dew from young vines" (Peiss 16). Clearly, the power of nature and the cycles of its life were connected with the aesthetic sense of beauty and youthfulness paralleled in the face of a woman.

With the advent of medical stringentness and scientific discoveries of the Enlightenment, this legacy of magic and superstition disappeared from the forefront of beauty. Instead, women were lectured on the importance of breathing, eating, sleeping, and emotional stability. These habits derived from the ancient tradition of the Humors linked the ideas of temperament and health to the appearance of the skin. In this theory, the four humors or bodily fluids - blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile in turn produce the human temperaments of sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic that reveal themselves in the appearance and condition of the skin (Peiss 15). Therefore, the inner and outer dynamics of appearance and spirit were inexorably tied and displayed themselves as such.