ABSTRACT
It must not be assumed that our first lip-stick and other cosmetic advertisements started Chinese girls on the cosmetic road to beauty. It would be very pleasant to harbour that thought but the facts do not justify it. Five thousand years ago, according to authentic Chinese history, Chinese girls were plucking useless hairs from their eyebrows, and putting rouge on their cheeks. It was probably an ancient custom even then. Old pictures show that, from century to century, there were changes in the style of applying rouge. Sometimes it was most prominent in the upper part of the cheek. At other times it was a vivid red circle marking the spot where the jaws are hinged. In some centuries it was used lavishly, sparingly in others, but it was always used. Dynasties have fallen and the country has been devastated by floods, famines
and civil wars, but the cosmetic business has always flourished. When the savage hordes from the North overran China, as they did from time to time, the barbarian women at once copied the beauty methods of the Chinese, but in a coarse barbarian way. They covered their cheeks and sometimes their foreheads with the reddest rouge they could get. The surviving Manchu women, representatives of China's most recent invasion (1618), rouge their faces in a way that makes the Chinese woman shudder. Japanese women also learned their first beauty lessons from the Chinese and do not appear to have added any refinement of their own. They are more restrained than the Manchus in the use of rouge, but their prodigal application of rice powder often gives them the appearance of a cake that has been covered with icing. Chinese women do not think much of them. They know that without the allurements of the kimona, obi, tahi and geta the sex-appeal of the Japanese woman would become a negligible quantity and that no Japanese woman would dare· to wear the revealing Chinese gown.
