The Beauty Industry
Aldous Huxley (1894--1963), British novelist, poet, essayist, was graduated from Oxford University. His major works include Point Counter Point (1928), Brave New World (1932), Brave New World Revisited (1958), and Ape and Esnce (1948). His most important work Brave New World, a science fiction, foretells the doom of mankind due to the development of modern science and technology.
The one American industry unaffected by the general depression of trade is the beauty industry. American women continue to spend on their faces and bodies as much as they spent before the coming of the tastesslump (暴跌) — about three million pounds a week. The facts and figures are “official,” and can be accepted as being substantially true. Reading them, I was only surprid by the comparative smallness of the sums expended. From the prodigious (巨大的) number of advertiments of aids to beauty contained in the American magazines, I had imagined that the personal appearance business must stand high up among the champions of American industry — the equal, or only just less than the equal, of bootlegging (走私漏税) and racketeering (讹诈), movies and automobiles. Still, one hundred
and fifty-six million pounds a year is a tidy sum 注释：a big sum. Rather more than twice the revenue of India, if I remember rightly.
I do not know what the European figures are. Much smaller undoubtedly. Europe is poor, and a face can cost as much in upkeep as a Rolls-Royce. The most that the majority of European women can do is just to wash and hope for the best. Perhaps the soap will produce its loudly advertid effects; perhaps it will transform them into the likeness of tho ravishing (令人陶醉的) creatures who smile so rosily and creamily, so peachily and pearlily, from every hoarding (广告招贴牌). Perhaps, on the other hand, it may not. In any ca, the more costly experiments in beautification are still as much beyond more European means as are high-powered motor-cars and electric refrigerators. Even in Europe, however, much more is now spent on beauty than was ever spent in the past. Not quite so much more as in America, that is all. But, everywhere, the increa has been undoubtedly enormous.
日语谐音>tbdThe fact is significant. To what is it due? In part, I suppod, to a general increa in pros
perity. The rich have always cultivated their personal appearance. The diffusion of wealth — such as it is — now permits tho of the poor who are less badly off than their fathers to do the same.
maya培训But this is, clearly, not the whole story. The modern cultwaving flag of beauty is not exclusively a function (in the mathematical n) of wealth. If it were, then the personal appearance industries would have been as hardly hit by the trade depression as any other business. But, as we have en, they have not suffered. Women are retrenching (紧缩) on other things than their faces. The cult of beauty must therefore be symptomatic of changes than have taken place outside the economic sphere. Of what changes? Of the changes, I suggest, in the status of women; of the changes in our attitude towards “the merely physical.”
Women, it is obvious, are freer than in the past. Freer not only to perform the generally unenviable social functions hitherto rerved to the male, but also freer to exerci the more pleasing, feminine privilege of being attractive. They have the right, if not to be less
virtuous than their grandmothers, at any rate to look less virtuous. The British Matron (主妇), not long since a creature of austere (严苛的) and even terrifying aspect, now does her best to achieve and perennially prerve the appearance of what her predecessor would have described as a Lost Woman (失足的女子). She often succeeds. But we are not shocked — at any rate, not morally shocked. Aesthetically (审美地) shocked — yes; we may sometimes be that. But morally, no. We concede that the Matron is morally justified in being preoccupied with her personal appearance. This concession depends on another of a more general nature — a concession to the Body, with a large B, to the Manichaean principle of evil. For we have now come to admit that body has its rights. And not only rights — duties, actually duties. It has, for example, a duty to do the best it can for itlf in the way of strength and beauty. Christian-ascetic (苦行的) ideas not longer trouble us. We demand whojustice for the body as well as for the soul. Hence, among other things, the fortunes made by face cream manufacturers and beauty-specialists, by the vendors of rubber reducing-belts (减肥束带) and massage machines, by the patentees (专利获得者) of hair-lotions and the authors of books on the culture of the abdomen.
What are the practical results of this modern cult of beauty? The exercis and the massage, the health motors and the skin foods — to what have they led? Are women more beautiful than they were? Do they get something for the enormous expenditure of energy, time, and money demanded of them by the beauty-cult? The are questions which it is difficult to answer. For the facts em to contradict themlves. The campaign for more physical beauty ems to be both a tremendous success and a lamentable全球最帅面孔第一名 failure. It depends how you look at the results.
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It is a success in so far as more women retain their youthful appearance to a greater age than in the past. “Old ladies” are already becoming rare. In a few years, we may well believe, they will be extinct. White hair and wrinkles, a bent back and hollow cheeks will come to be regarded as medievally old-fashioned. The crone (老太婆) of the future will be golden, curly and cherry-lipped, neat-ankled and slender. The Portrait of the Artist’s Mother will come to be almost indistinguishable, at future picture shows, from the Portrait of the Artist’s Daughter. This desirable 泡泡少儿consummation will be due in part to skin foods and injections of paraffin-wax (粗石蜡), facial surgery, mud baths, and paint, in part to improve
d health, due in its turn to a more rational mode of life. Ugliness is one of the symptoms of dia, beauty of health. In so far as the campaign for more beauty is also a campaign for more health, it is admirable and, up to a point, genuinely successful. Beauty that is merely the artificial shadow of the symptoms of health is intrinsically of poorer quality than the genuine article. Still, it is a sufficiently good imitation to be sometimes mistakable for the real thing. The apparatus全身快速美白 for mimicking the symptoms of health is now within the reach of every moderately prosperous person; the knowledge of the way in which real health can be achieved is growing, and will in time, no doubt, be universally acted upon. When that happy moment comes, will every woman be beautiful—as beautiful, at any rate, as the natural shape of her features, with or without surgical and chemical aid permits?
