The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (1.1894)

yS A Defence of Cosmetics

face is, in manner, most like the painting of canvas, in outcome it
is rather akin to the art of music—lasting, like music's echo, not
for very long. So that, no doubt, of the many little appurte-
nances of the Reformed Toilet Table, not the least vital will be
a list of the emotions that become its owner, with recipes for
simulating them. According to the colour she wills her hair to
be for the tirae—black or yellow or, peradventure, burnished red
—she will blush for you, sneer for you, laugh or languish for you.
The good combinations of line and colour are nearly numberless,
and by their means poor restless woman will be able to realise her
moods in all their shades and lights and dappledoms, to live many
lives and masquerade through many moments of joy. No mono-
tony will be. And for us men matrimony will have lost its
sting. • •

But be it remembered ! Though we men will garner these
oblique boons, it is into the hands of women that Artifice gives her
pigments. I know, I know that many men in a certain sect of
society have shown a marked tendency to the use of cosmetics. I
speak not of the countless gentlemen who walk about town in the
time of its desertion from August to October, artificially bronzed,
as though they were fresh from the moors or from the Solent.
This, I conceive, is done for purely social reasons and need not
concern me here. Rather do I speak of those who make them-
selves up, seemingly with an a;sthetic purpose. Doubtless—I
wish to be quite just—there are many who look the better
for such embellishment; but, at the hazard of being thought old-
fashioned and prejudiced, I cannot speak of the custom with any-
thing but strong disapproval. If men are to lie among the
rouge-pots, inevitably it will tend to promote that amalgamation of
the sexes which is one of the chief planks in the decadent platform
and to obtund that piquant contrast between him and her, which

is