title: Peculiar Beauty: Three Centuries of Charmingly Absurd Advice
author: Bonnie Downing
description: This compilation of personal beauty advice dating from the late 1700s to today, though entertaining, fails to amount to anything greater than its superficial parts. Editor Downing gleans random bits from years of tracking what she calls an "underappreciated genre" and packages them into short chapters with witty titles like "Meat, Grease, and Booze" and "Near Death Experiences." In a slim introduction, she writes, "I hope you'll laugh out loud when you read suggestions to wash your hair in gasoline, or to add spinach leaves to the bathbut really, is any of it stranger than Botox?" From inspirational writing by familiar beauty icons like Elizabeth Taylor ("If you think a picture of me as Miss Lard will inspire you, go ahead and put it on your refrigerator") to vintage avowals by lesser-knowns ("We might as well admit there's a dash of hussy in all ladies"), readers are bombarded with the timeless notion that a woman's goal should be to look her best at all times and under all circumstances. But with few insightful cultural observations or historical explanations (one sidebar notes that the "raw food" fad dates to the 1800s; another tells the origin of Vaseline), this assemblage is little more than amusingexcept when it's just plain disturbing. Photos. <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text:  
   
  L o v e L es s o n s
  
  Chapter O n e
   
  “Dear, could I possibly get you to do something for me?”
  On the surface, the question seemed harmless enough,
  especially when the petite white-haired lady asking it looked like she
  could have stepped right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. When
  one actually knew the matchmaking schemer that lay beneath that
  innocent exterior, though, one learned to pay close attention before
  committing to anything.
  And Nadia Normandy had long ago learned to pay very close
  attention. Straightening from behind the Heavenly Bites display case
  in which she was rearranging a tray of cream puffs, she put both
  hands squarely on the counter and leaned forward to look the older
  woman straight in the eye. Well, forward and down;  Mrs. Beasley
  was only four foot eleven. “Who is he, Mrs. B?”
  Her customer blinked at her through enormous tortoiseshell
  glasses, her eyes wide with innocence. Considering how much the
  huge lenses magnified her eyes, they looked very wide indeed