MAKEUP!

This bit of wisdom that I am about to quote, may be from Ovid.

"Men pursue women?"

"Does a mousetrap pursue mice?"

One of the weapons of pursuit in women's arsenal is MAKEUP.

Let me list a few of my thoughts about MAKEUP:

01.  As a young child I enjoyed watching my mother get ready for her dates.  Although she was a beautiful person, she felt the need to augment her beauty with MAKEUP.

First, she would paint her legs brown, with a dark line drawn in back.  This was to emulate nylon stockings, which were expensive and hard to get during World War II.

Next, she applied some sort of sweet-smelling salve to her face.  This was supposed to mask acne scars and pockmarks, neither of which she had.

She then applied several layers of stuff that made her skin glow like the smooth surface of the popular Charlie Macarthy dolls.

After buffing with a powder puff, with her natural beauty enhanced, she was ready to meet the world and her many boyfriends.

02.  Cleopatra started it all!  She must have been good at it, because two of her lovers were leaders of the Roman Empire.  Someone said she owed it all to kohl, whatever that is, but it must be potent.

03.  My favorite hated object is eye MAKEUP.  Do you remember Tammy Faye? Nobody had ever seen her eyes because they were always hidden under tons of black stuff.

As Tammy and her conman husband faded from view or went to prison, her position as eye MAKEUP user extraordinaire passed on to another lady.

You've seen her many times in magazine ads. She is the lady that yells: "Help!  I've fallen and I can't get up!" 

Please, will someone help her up so I don't have to see this disgusting ad ever again. Perhaps in future ads they could show a real life woman in her natural beauty, rather than the current lady who makes me think she is dressed and made up to bedazzle the 911 EMT's.

04.  Once a friend and I were devouring a pint at a London cafe (not a pub), when a young lady sidled over to us and sat at our table.

At first glance, she looked to be a movie star, with every hair in place and her face like a smooth doll's cheek.  AS she sat talking with us, her MAKEUP started to melt, revealing the acne scars and pockmarks that I mentioned before.  Very sad.

05.  Anon wrote:

"In the Elizabethan Age many women, in search of skin that looked like porcelain, whitened their faces using ceruse, a potentially lethal combination of vinegar and lead.

Queen Elizabeth I used ceruse so consistently that it eventually ate pits into her skin, causing her to pile the paint on in thicker and thicker layers in hopes of camouflaging the growing damage.

This, in turn, only led to more corrosion, and the Virgin Queen's face was ultimately so ravaged that she ordered all mirrors banned from the palace.

... Elizabeth's servants exploited the ban on mirrors in a wickedly mischievous way: Every morning they painted the queen's face white with ceruse, but they painted her nose 'a cruel crimson.'"

06.  The Week Magazine writes:

"Wealthy Manhattanites are rubbing bird poop into their faces in a bizarre bid for beauty.  The luxury Shizuka New York salon charges $180 for a traditional Japanese treatment known as the 'geisha facial,' which involves pasting a mix of imported Asian nightingale excrement and powdered rice bran onto a client's face.

Spa owner Shizuka Bernstein said that because nightingales eat only seeds, their droppings contain a natural enzyme that helps rejuvenate the skin.' We don't use Central Park (pigeon) facials,' she said, 'because those birds eat garbage.'"

07.  I remember a TV show, Laugh-In or Smothers Brothers, where a cast member would periodically run on stage screaming "MAKEUP" and dust everyone with a giant powder puff.

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Go and slather no more!