Beauty Culture Quotes

External beauty is a bizarre thing to me.

I think I can be beautiful with all the little stuff done, and I can be ugly. A lot of attractive actresses can't be ugly.

American Women: How they mortify the flesh in order to make it appetizing! Their beauty is a vast industry, their enduring allure a discipline which nuns or athletes might find excessive.

No man receives the full culture of a man in whom the sensibility to the beautiful is not cherished; and there is no condition of life from which it should be excluded. Of all luxuries this is the cheapest, and the most at hand, and most important to those conditions where coarse labor tends to give grossness to the mind.

Beauty pageants in general are foreign and noxious to me: I can barely muster the energy to put on lip gloss and mascara.

On one hand I am this weird androgynous tomboy where I'm strangely low maintenance and have a five-minute makeup regimen. On the other I'm obsessed with all things beauty, from skin care to makeup.

I've been told to wear different things, to look different, to lose weight, to look sexier, to wear more hair, to wear more makeup.

The fact is external feminine beauty is highly valued, and we are constantly given the message that a slamming body is the most valuable thing a woman can possess.

Yes and our obsession with youth in our culture and how we, women lie about their age after 35 obsessively and no one wants to let anyone know they're getting older, et cetera.

In the earliest days, make-up and moralising were intertwined. The 'cosmetic slops and washes' of the 17th and 18th centuries aimed to smooth complexions and revive a woman's 'bloom' - but their critics were never far behind.

Women's behavior in handling beauty, even before feminism, was to deny they had any. Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.

There are stereotypes that have been out there for a long time that tell girls that their main asset, the main thing that they are valued for, is their appearance and also that it's to the exclusion of anything else.

I think wearing less makeup can seem a bit scary for some women because we get so used to seeing ourselves look a certain way.

There's a reason why forty, fifty, and sixty don't look the way they used to, and it's not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It's because of hair dye. In the 1950's only 7 percent of American women dyed their hair; today there are parts of Manhattan and Los Angeles where there are no gray-haired women at all.

Well, I think mostly we're dressing for men.

We live in a beauty-obsessed culture, which on one hand is absolutely fabulous, but on the flip side, is also dangerously extreme.

I grew up in a makeup chair. And to see the women around me getting ready was so aspirational. It's about mothers and daughters, a girl watching her mom at a vanity table.

I was always reading those beauty magazines and wanting to become this unattainable thing.

Growing up, there was a lot of pressure for women to be good-looking, but my mum was very strict, and she didn't allow me to wear make-up. Looking back, it was good for me. It slowed me down from becoming an adult too quickly.

We live in a quick-fix society where we need instant gratification for everything. Too fat? Get lipo-sucked. Stringy hair? Glue on extensions. Wrinkles and lines? Head to the beauty shop for a pot of the latest miracle skin stuff. It's all a beautiful £1 billion con foisted upon insecure women by canny cosmetic conglomerates.

Our culture often demeans and devalues the work, the pleasures, and the contributions of women and feminine people. This is, in part, why beauty culture is dismissed as unimportant and frivolous.

Physical beauty is such a strange thing.

Women take great care of themselves in France. It's a culture dedicated to making women beautiful and to manners.

Beauty has been democratised. No longer the preserve of movie stars and models but available to all. But while the invitation to beauty is welcomed, it has become not so much an option as an imperative.

Selling beauty is something I can understand. Even selling false beauty seems perfectly natural; it's a sign of progress.