Cabinet Cards - Valentines Pretty Girls All!

THESE IMAGES ARE NOT TO BE COPIED IN ANY FORM!
Here are 4 pretty valentines from my cab card collection - pretty maids all! I started collecting this sort of image because I have very long hair and I like to do it up in Civil War to Victorian fashion for various social events. We have several period outfits that we wear that are part of the "brand" of our antique business, and the hair has to be right too. But then I got interested in the ephemeral nature of beauty. Where are all these beauties now? Ashes to ashes and dust to dust......And were they beautiful all their lives......well......hmmmm......I do have some wonderful images of very attractive older women who are very classy and very beautiful that I will also share when I get around to it. So maybe yes some of them were beautiful all their lives! This got me interested in cabinet card and CDV books where you can see (if you are lucky) several generations of one family and certainly the same person shown several times over the span of their life. These books are much harder to find than single images, and are expensive if they still hold the original images (it's not hard to figure out if someone has just crammed any old cards into an empty album....), but they are worth every penny as they not only show the same people over time - as children, as young people, getting married, having their own children, as adults, as matriarchs and patriarchs - but there is also so much context.......how they lived - the wallpaper, furniture, plants, decor, pictures on the wall, and even their sense of humour. So this is the slippery slope of the collector's trail.......wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!