Adam Kissel

Is it ethically wrong to wear cosmetics? Male writers, almost universally, have condemned all use of cosmetics, [2] while later female writers (especially in the United States, beginning in about the nineteenth century) [3] begin to defend the use of cosmetics.

Most attacks center around charges, on the one hand, that cosmetics encourage or express the vices of vanity, undue pride, and coquetry, and, on the other hand, that cosmetics are naturally, inherently suspect as artifices and as arts of dissimulation. Even if cosmetics are not external expressions of internal vices, they write, it is wrong to change the face given by God, warts and all, or to subvert or hide the effects of natural aging. Especially for the Christian writers, if nature is good and given by God, and if the so-called defects in the natural face have been given for a divine purpose or even as a blessing, it is a sin to mask the divine gifts because of personal vice. Many such attacks draw heavily on the rhetoric of the status of the arts in comparison to nature.[4]

Many defenses also are grounded on the rhetoric of nature. If nature's products are good and given for the free use and enjoyment of man, why should the face be prevented from fulfilling its natural role as an expression of beauty? Why should natural pigments, which seem to have no other use, be wasted rather than used on the face? If it is the nature of the face to be beautiful, it must be a crime not to fix defects. Sometimes inductive arguments about human nature are also used to defend cosmetics (although such defenses must be based on the presupposition that these parts of human nature are necessarily good): since women of all times and places use cosmetics, it is part of their God-given nature.

John Gauden's[5] A Discourse of Artificial Beauty, in Point of Conscience, Between Two Ladies: With Some Satyrical Censures on the Vulgar Errors of These Times (1662; first ed., 1656) engages all of these arguments. It is also--if not the first prolonged attempt of a man to see cosmetics from women's points of view--certainly the longest attempt, at 262 pages.[6] The Discourse is set as a conversation "between two ladies," one woman presenting her objections concisely, and the other woman defending cosmetics at some length. Most of the arguments spring from the two women's fairly similar views of nature (which in one sense, but not always, includes conscience and the faculty of reason, and in another sense, can include some parts of civilization as outgrowths of human nature) and their agreement about nature's moral authority in comparison to scripture, tradition, and other forms of culture. A Discourse of Artificial Beauty is an excellent seventeenth-century source for understanding how the rhetoric of nature can affect the more specific ethical discussions of the period.[7]

The present writer, perhaps not only because I am male, but also a Christian who tends to give the classical and patristic traditions the benefit of the doubt, is somewhat more predisposed to agree with the first woman (and with Gauden) that while it might be possible to use cosmetics with pure motives, most use of cosmetics ultimately is an expression of vanity. I am predisposed to agree with the first woman, who will argue from the beginning that the impulse of vanity has such a strong effect on the conscience that it deforms the conscience, so that many people easily bring themselves to believe that bad actions are actually neutral or even good actions. Although the first woman does not personally attack the second woman on this point, the clear implication for the reader is that it will be very hard to get an unbiased presentation from the second woman.

Even so, cosmetics is not our main subject. Although both women may abuse certain premises about nature in order to develop their conclusions about cosmetics, the premises themselves remain relatively clear. Furthermore, since the Discourse is primarily about cosmetics rather than about nature, it is not necessary to proceed sequentially through the arguments. It will be more useful to rearrange the passages about nature into a logical order so as to trace out the two women's views of nature. Because the book is now out of print, I include fairly long quotations and a few superfluous ones so that the present reader can get a better sense of the book as a whole, not to mention the unusual orthography, diction, syntax, and spelling (for example, one must remember to read "human" where one sees "humane"). Because many of the quotations are fairly clear, in several places I am able to print them with a minimum of explanation. At some points it is almost enough, for the purposes of the present study, to reconstruct the passages from throughout the book into a logical order.

The Discourse is preceded by the publisher's note "To the Ingenuous READER."[8] This introduction presages some of the most important arguments and conceptions of nature that the two women will use in their discussion. Most notably, the publisher's own narrative here, regarding how he came to publish the work, anticipates the most significant part of the second woman's argument: the interpretation of motive as the key to distinguishing between appearance and reality when it comes to judging sins.

In other words, the entire dialogue has both a surface appearance, which is easily taken for vanity by the publisher in his first glance, and a deeper meaning. The deeper meaning, the reality behind the appearance, turns out not to be about vanity but about piety. The dialogue is not designed to be a show of rhetoric but to genuinely satisfy women's consciences, one way or the other, regarding the choice of whether or not to use cosmetics. The same disjunction between appearance and reality will be argued, by the second woman, in the case of cosmetics themselves. A woman who wears cosmetics may at first glance seem to be acting out of vanity, but in fact she may be piously performing an act of worship and thanksgiving for God's gift of the freedom and materials needed to make her face as beautiful as possible. One must inquire into her motives before commending or condemning her actions. The second woman will continually return to the question of motive as she defends the use of cosmetics.[10]

Irony and humor abound in the Discourse and are the hallmarks of many discourses about cosmetics.[11] In the very next statement the publisher begins with irony but ends with a serious comment about the relationship between art and nature:

As for the more serious ending, such "relief" is "so obvious" in the natural world, as the second woman will show, because it certainly is the case that animals and plants frequently use color to benefit themselves.[12] Behind this observation is the argument that whatever we find in the natural world must be "innocent," on the premise that animals and plants cannot have evil motives. But although the lack of motive insures the innocence of animals, we cannot say the same about people. Even though the contrivances of art require more initiative than the biochemistry of nature needs to produce its colors, this fact does not make the human arts any less innocent. On the other hand, since human motives go beyond what animals do by nature, the human arts at the very least are liable to become less innocent. The publisher's quick comment at the end of a humorous sentence, though it is only a few words, already points the reader toward a profitable study of the influences of motive and conceptions of nature in the women's moral considerations about the arts.

Just a few more words of introduction are in order, regarding the structure of the book. The publisher's view of the rhetoric in the dialogue is Aristotelian, in that the point of rhetoric is merely to show all the available arguments that may lead to persuasion, rather than to take a side:[13]

Rhetoric here is described as the kind of art that holds a mirror to nature, or more specifically to reason and conscience, neither adding nor taking away from the available means of persuasion. This view of art, in which the artist piously uses materials given by God, is another central piece of the second woman's argument. On the other hand, as the first woman argues, there may be no pious way to use the materials of cosmetics (or of rhetoric, as Socrates all but declares in the dialogues), even though such materials may exist.[14] It is important to add here that the publisher recognizes three sources of moral authority for these claims about rhetoric and cosmetics, all derived from God: scripture, nature (in this context, the empirical "facts on the ground"), and conscience.

The dialogue is structured as a set of long answers to a series of thirteen objections. The objections follow and summarize the biblical, classical, and patristic tradition of arguments against cosmetics.[15] They are structured so that the second woman's answer to each objection prompts the first woman to introduce the following objection. They are:

1. Against all Painting the Face as unlawful.
2. Jezebel's sad fate urged against all Painting the Face.
3. Other places of Scripture urged against Painting the Face.
4. Urged against all superfluous Ornaments of women, and so against Painting.
5. Painting the Face against the Seventh Commandment forbidding all Adultery.
6. Painting the Face argues an heart unsatisfied with God's works and disposings, Jam.4.7.
7. Painting the Face a badge of Vanity and appearance of evil.
8. Painting the Face a mark of Pride, Arrogancy and Hypocrisie.
9. The Fathers and modern Divines much against all Painting the Face.
10. Painting the Face very scandalous, and so unlawful.
11. Painting the Face a thing of ill-report, and so not to be followed.
12. Painting the Face unlawful, because doubtful at best, and not of faith.
13. Of Peter Martyr against Painting the Face, from many Scripture instances.

Although scripture and conscience are the most common moral authorities in these headings, a surprising and substantial portion of the arguments rests on both women's view of nature. To see this, we now must enter the arguments.

For both women, the highest moral authority is God, and the surest record of God's moral claims is found in scripture. Scripture trumps the texts of the Fathers; and at least for the second woman (let us call her Mary Kay, and the first woman Agatha), the moral authority of reason and conscience, which are important constituents of human nature,[16] trumps them too (169, 210).[17] Neither woman investigates the difficult point of what to do when reason and scripture seem to contradict each other, but the implication remains that even with reason on its side, the moral authority of nature is trumped by scripture. When scripture is interpreted correctly and when reason is applied properly, they would say, of course, that there is no real contradiction between reason and scripture: both must be used in concert.[18]

Conscience, on the other hand, falls below both scripture and reason. If conscience seems to contradict scripture or right reason, it is the conscience which must be in error. Both women agree that conscience carries this weaker kind of moral authority, but they differ on the amount of authority that it commands. Mary Kay barely agrees with Agatha that conscience is liable to error at all, though Mary Kay does admit that it must be tested by a greater authority: "the divine mind, or will . . . must be the only touchstone of sin, and test of Conscience, wherein no great curiosity is necessary to discern God's meaning as to things importing sin or duty" (42). Mary Kay's usual line is that

Mary Kay asserts here that conscience is an infallible moral guide, following the irresistible pull of reason and scripture. Mary Kay often speaks of the "moral light" as though conscience were synonymous with reason itself:

Mary Kay is "almost" convinced that our conscience does not fail us when it is called upon to judge grievous sins. She emphasizes the successes of conscience, neglecting to mention that conscience may fail us when it is called upon to judge minor sins, such as the use of cosmetics may turn out to be. In fact she seems to think that conscience is generally a good guide at all times.

Agatha, on the other hand, emphasizes the fact that the conscience can be warped to the point that it stops following the dictates of reason or other moral authorities. Her first objection begins thus:

Agatha implies that a woman's natural conscience endows her with an original ability to know that cosmetics is an immoral art and harmful to the soul.[19] But women may also suffer from a "defiling of their Consciences," and in this case some women defile their own consciences by using cosmetics out of discontent and against their better judgment. In their discontent they bring themselves to believe that using cosmetics is in fact something good.

Later Mary Kay admits that the conscience can be warped, because she is trying to show how her opponents' consciences have been defiled:

But this argument cuts both ways. It ought to undermine Mary Kay's trust in her own conscience.

The difficult philosophical question on the subject of the ethics of cosmetics or any art is the question, what is the moral nature, the inherent moral status of that art? Mary Kay asks the question this way: people should not give "their verdict of things as good or evil, till they have duly considered the nature of them, apart from vulgar prejudices and surmises" (206). Let us look again at Agatha's opening statement in order to see how each woman answers the question.

Agatha begins with a moral point based on several claims about nature. I have just discussed the place of conscience, but it is important to note further that she is asserting that a person's conscience can be defiled because of a false perception of the insufficiency of nature. Those women who use cosmetics out of dissatisfaction with the measure of beauty they have been given (by God via nature), she says, are ruining their souls.

But Agatha also is making a strong claim here that cosmetics, by its very nature, is an immoral art. For Agatha cosmetics is not one of those arts that can be used for good or ill; it is not a "fine" art but simply a "filthy" one. Any alteration of the face whatsoever is a deforming of the natural face given by God through nature. Compare this passage from the third objection:

By this standard, every face is a good face, sufficient in itself, suitable for its purpose regardless of anyone's interpretation of its beauty, and therefore not to be altered.

On this point, and regarding the general claim that all use of cosmetics is necessarily sinful, Mary Kay fundamentally disagrees. She believes that cosmetics is inherently one of the neutral arts, and she sometimes goes so far as to suggest that every art is inherently neutral. Again and again, in different contexts, she returns to motive as the deciding factor:

Mary Kay grounds her argument on the claim that it is possible to use cosmetics with unmitigated piety, purity, and charity. Agatha, on the other hand, insists that the very use of cosmetics is inherently impious and impure, invariably demonstrating a dissatisfaction with the natural beauty of the face.

Although Agatha dissents from Mary Kay's statement that there can be an "innocent use of auxiliary beauty," Mary Kay summarizes her point by flatly rejecting the notion that it is "in the very nature of the thing a sin" (97). In fact a woman can use cosmetics

It is apparent that for Agatha to be consistent, she must show that everything Mary Kay thinks is a "defect" is actually part of God's providential plan, better left alone. In order for Mary Kay to be consistent, it is not enough for her to turn the question back to one of motive. Mary Kay needs to show how a woman can intuit a normative aesthetic standard so as to know when she is using cosmetics prudently, fixing only the true defects, those defects which it is a duty to change. The reader may wish that Agatha would challenge Mary Kay directly about this unlikely quantity of prudence.

While God, scripture, reason, conscience, tradition, and nature all are overlapping sources of moral authority, art is one of the objects about which these authorities make claims. Is all art an affront to nature? Agatha nearly asserts that it is:

At the least, all those arts which seem to change our appearance, especially those that make us seem different than we are, are black marks on our character. She says, "I absolutely think . . . all colour or complexion added to our skins or faces, beyond what is purely natural, to be a sin" (7).

But Mary Kay wisely asserts that art is not as affront to nature: "some men seek to confine all women to their pure and simple naturals: as if Art and Nature were not sisters, but jealous rivals, and irreconcileable enemies against each other; whereas indeed they are from the same wise God" (89). Both art and nature are among God's good gifts. (I will discuss the role of nature as gift in a later section.) Furthermore, she says that cosmetics achieve by art what blushing achieves by nature. An "artificial change is but a fixation of natures inconstancy, both imitating its frequent essays, & helping its variating infirmities" (57). In other words, art acts as a mirror of nature, and a good art does not seek to go beyond what nature can do on its own.

Mary Kay adds that the alterations of cosmetics, when used prudently, change the face only as a matter of degree and not as a matter of kind. She admits that an improper use of cosmetics does seek to change the face drastically:

She goes on to say that as a woman inevitably approaches death, she ought to stop worrying about external beauty, but that in the meantime she may pay attention to such beauty. The "invincible wrinkles and irreparable ruines" are to be left alone, but women are allowed to fix the truly fixable, changing the face only as a matter of degree. In other words:

Especially, then, when the face, either by some unfortunate act of nature or some human accident, is unnaturally deformed so as to make one part of the face seem older or uglier than it should look at that age, this is the right time for a person to use cosmetics (with the proper moderation). Mary Kay emphasizes here that she is not condoning "vanity, pride and wantonness" as motives (97). The question is, however, how much cosmetics can a person wear before she becomes indiscreet and disingenuous? When does the change of degree become a change in kind? When does this art become a dissimulating craft?

The proper use of cosmetics does not deceptively change the face into something else: it is no more than "a little quickness of colour upon the skin; it alters not the substance, fashion, feature, proportions, temper or constitutions of nature" (57). Art is not an enemy but a friend to nature, helping nature fulfill its natural ends. "Art studiously and speedily either encounters Natures enemies, or fortifies its outworks against all assaults, or repairs its breaches, and every way kindly comes in as its Second and Auxiliary to assist it against all infirmities original or accidental" (59).

Since Mary Kay has shortened the distance between nature and art, and because she believes that all arts are inherently neutral, she can build a strong case by arguing by analogy. Even if cosmetics were to go farther than nature could go on its own, even if cosmetics produce a color that the face would not otherwise have, it would be no worse than those "more gross and mechanick arts" that are used in wigs, prosthetic limbs, artificial teeth, and so on (58).

The arts are inescapable in human civilization; even language, with its figures of speech, is liable to frequent ornamentation. If we permit all these other arts, what is so special about the face that excludes it from ornamentation? We might think that Mary Kay sees nothing special about the face. In the following passage she brings the analogy even closer to home. Those who censure face painters, she says, are the same people

Since all manner of other products are used on the face, without condemnation, why not the colors of cosmetics? Mary Kay elides the distinction between the art of face painting, which leaves new marks (however discreet) on the face, on the one hand, and plasters and such, which are designed to restore the face given by God by reversing or suspending the decay (by smoothing out wrinkles and so forth), on the other hand. In her analogy, the arts of restoration and the arts of ornamentation differ only in degree and not in kind.

But of course, analogies work in two directions. At the same time that Mary Kay makes her analogies to prove that face painting should not be condemned, John Gauden the author[24] uses those same analogies to show the vanity and hypocrisy of a wide variety of arts. If the face-painting art is inherently bad, and if other arts differ only in degree and not in kind, then a much larger category of arts is also bad. As early as the third page of the dialogue, the author here is beginning his hidden "Satyrical Censures on the Vulgar Errors of These Times" (the book's subtitle).[25] It is hard to miss the satire in the adjectives in the following analogies, in which Mary Kay states that if wearing cosmetics is a sin, so is

Gauden is suggesting that not just cosmetics are at issue, but the whole art of making oneself "look better." Agatha makes this point explicit: sins are "any pretensions to advance our Honors, Estates, Healths, or Beauties" (7).

In any case, Agatha challenges some of Mary Kay's analogies altogether, asserting that there is truly something different about the class of arts that includes cosmetics and the beauty of the face:

She implies that it is impossible to be "modest and gracious" while using cosmetics. She goes on to make the case that there is an inherent immodesty and lack of "shamefacedness and sobriety" in the face-painting art, which makes it different from the kinds that produce prosthetic limbs or the kind of arts that doctors use.

More relevant to the specific debate is Mary Kay's understanding of the ideal face. To make her analogies, she had to argue that the face is not much different than all the other objects of ornamentation and restoration. But in order to claim an aesthetic norm of beauty for the face, so that women will know how to use cosmetics with appropriate moderation, she also must argue that the face has its own unique character. To Mary Kay, it is in the very nature of the face to be a beautiful object. She calls the face "the chief Theatre, Throne and Centre of Beauty, to which all outward array is subservient" (31), and "the Metropolis of humane Majesty, and as it were the Cathedral of beauty or comeliness in the little world or Polity of our bodies" (81). (Mary Kay also admits, however, to the detriment of her argument, that the face is "the Regent and directrix of the whole bodies culture, motion, and welfare" (31). If these other, more obvious, uses are the true natural ends for which the face exists, her case for the normative requirement of beauty is diminished.) Even a face that is born with a "natural" defect or deformity is a visage alien to the ideal natural face. As the face ages, decays, and loses its beauty, the natural face becomes corrupted; within the limits already described, it must be returned to the normative state of beauty, for as long as the restoration can be convincing:

Mary Kay does not explain why time, the agent of decay, introduces an unnatural element, or why time makes the human face worse but a mountain's rock face, perhaps, more beautiful. Even so, Mary Kay agrees with Agatha on a secondary point: nature, whether instanced as a woman's initially clear conscience or as a woman's initially beautiful face, is not unchangeably good, but it can be corrupted. Both women can be said to be on different parts of the same mission: Agatha seeks to cure a corrupt conscience, while Mary Kay all but commands that it is a woman's natural duty to repair the beauty of her aged face.

The women do not take up the related metaphysical question of whether a conscience can be born corrupt, but Mary Kay pushes the point that a face can be born ugly or of a faulty complexion. In her answer to the fifth objection, Mary Kay says that God "oft suffers Nature in its ordinary road or tract to erre, or fail of those proportions which are most perfect and agreeable" (62). It should be noted that Mary Kay seldom moves beyond Agatha's particular criticism, that people who believe that a face can be born so ugly that it needs remedy are "not content with Natures stock of Beauty" (2), meager as it may be in that instance. Since Mary Kay underscores the idea of a unique aesthetic norm regarding the beauty of the face, and because she has such a high degree of faith in the uncorrupted conscience of women in discerning that norm, she has trouble understanding how women can err. In her mind they are not discontent; they merely are identifying obvious and curable defects in the ideal face.

Mary Kay even goes so far as to claim that those who refuse to aid the beauty of their faces are lazy and remiss in their duty:

Arguments like Agatha's, she says, encourage us to sit passively without any attempt to better ourselves. The aesthetic norm becomes a moral norm: women must fix the defects in beauty that they find in their faces. According to Mary Kay, our duty is first "to remedy what we may," and only second "to bear what we cannot cure" (77).

Both Mary Kay and Agatha find moral authority in human nature. They express human nature in two vastly different ways. In a holistic sense, whatever we are, whatever God and nature designed us to be, this is how we ought to be. In this propositional formulation of human nature, it is an unfortunate situation but not a counter-argument to show that we fall short of God's ideal.

But a second sense of human nature is an inductive or empirical one. Whatever people always and everywhere are found to do, this is what people naturally are. In other words, whatever we find to be common in people is natural to them, and therefore it has moral force. As Mary Kay says, an important source of moral evidence is our "experience in the world" (142). Agatha makes the point more explicitly when she explains why (in her opinion) women of her time feel ashamed when others see them applying cosmetics:

This is how tradition and culture garner a small but important amount of moral authority in a system where scripture and nature hold the highest places under God.[27] I will first examine the two women's use of human nature in this empirical sense.

Mary Kay argues that since cosmetics is a normal part of grooming done all over the world, it is part of human nature and therefore acceptable.

But Agatha's counter-argument can follow the same line of reasoning. On her side she produces

Indeed this argument comprises the whole of Agatha's ninth objection. Since all the most learned people of every generation agree that all use of cosmetics is sinful, Agatha implies that our reasoning faculty (if we reason as well as possible) should lead us naturally to the same conclusion.

In response to this challenge Mary Kay retreats, and she shows how this line of reasoning should be abandoned, because it can turn out to be extremely faulty:

Later she repeats that we must seek the true nature of an art regardless of what most people, or even the revered Fathers, may think (206, 210). Thus both women ultimately abandon the inductive method as an unreliable indicator of human nature.

The propositional understanding of human nature remains, however, and Mary Kay offers two propositions about human nature. First, she says that it is in our nature is to appreciate beauty and enjoy life. Second, she says that the nature of humans is to be free and to freely and creatively use the materials of our natural environment. These propositions are related, but I will treat them separately here. Mary Kay's proposition that our nature is to enjoy the fine things of life is built both out of the theological metaphor that humans are the children of a parent God, and further on the argument that people are naturally weak and childlike in our behavior and interests:

While we live in this world, she says, we may have our playthings. This world is one in which we can and should appreciate the beauties around us, not only as symbols of the ineffable beauties and majesties of the heavenly world, but also for the pure enjoyment they give us in this world. Mary Kay implies that cosmetics and the face are excellent toys that we may use to appreciate and contribute to beauty. Furthermore she says:

For Mary Kay it is human nature both to delight in the beautiful and to eschew or emend the ugly. Even if our aesthetic sense seems irrational or unnecessary to the purity of divine life under God's dominion, the aesthetic sense is inarguably a part of every one of us, indeed part of the definition of being human.

Perhaps more abstractly, Mary Kay also develops the proposition that human nature is about freedom and creativity. She claims that man is "free-born, not onely in nature, but as to grace and the new birth, which is no enemy to what fashions modestly may bear, and which decency, civility and custome do require." (85-86) This freedom, however, is not coextensive with freedom from punishment for certain actions. Wherever God's law has intervened to prohibit an action, that action cannot be performed without spiritual consequences; but where there has been no prohibition against an action, it may be done freely and without sin, and likewise it is no sin if that action is not performed (14):

In her answers to Agatha's second and third objections, Mary Kay thinks she has shown that scripture does not prohibit the use of cosmetics.[28] As a result she believes that God has given us the freedom to use them or not as we please.

Indeed an important part of human liberty is to use freely and according to our wishes all those things God has given us. The ability to use art is a gift given by God to man but not to the other animals (63), although some later naturalists would disagree.[29]

We can enjoy using arts in recognition of God's "special love and indulgence," and we can enjoy the productions and results of those arts as well. This freedom is limited, morally speaking, only by propriety and the moderate use of what we have been given (unless God has given a special pronouncement on the matter) and, physically speaking, by the fact that we can only produce certain results from a given set of raw materials, according to the natural properties of those materials.

We are nevertheless permitted to use nature's products for functions very different than the functions those products performed in their original environments. At the same time Mary Kay notes the ultimate practical limits of freedom: we cannot create matter out of nothing, and we cannot change the true nature of a thing, though we may change its outward appearance and even be deceived by the apparent change.

It is also important to note here that Mary Kay sees the creative power as a gift[30] which lets us glorify God by emulating him.

In this regard, we become co-creators[31] with God, doing his work, when we use the arts. In fact Mary Kay believes that God lets nature err deliberately,

Humans are in this sense a tertiary cause of God's providence, when we work in concert with his plan by using the natural materials he has provided. Mary Kay implies that one way to know God's will is to combine our aesthetic sense with our reason: if we see that God or nature has produced something ugly, we must assume that God wants or expects us human beings to be the ones to beautify it.[32]

In fact, it almost becomes our duty to use God's gifts of the arts in this manner, and a sin not to use them:

The paradox here is that Mary would give us the duty of using our freedom as fully as possible.[33] While Agatha had argued that women who use cosmetics are ungrateful because they are dissatisfied with the amount of beauty God has given them, Mary Kay now argues that women who do not use cosmetics (when it would benefit their beauty to do so) are the ungrateful ones, refusing to use their God-given abilities to make themselves look better and thereby to glorify God.

Mary Kay goes further, and adds to the charge of ungratefulness the charge of wastefulness. If we refuse to use cosmetics, she says, some of nature's products will never be used at all.

The presuppositions here are that God creates all things for a purpose, and all of those purposes must be good; therefore, if the only use we can find for gemstones or other natural objects is ornamentation, then they must have been designed for our use in this specific employment.

If we neglect this invitation, we waste not only those natural objects, but also our innate artistic talents. Notice that Mary Kay sneaks in another claim about the aesthetic norm of beauty for the face; she assumes that a natural and proper use for such "tinctures and colourings" is the face rather than clothing or the artist's canvas or some other object.

Agatha does not agree with Mary Kay that the cosmetic art is left wholly in our hands to use however we desire. She agrees that our faces have been given by God (via nature), and that the natural beauty of our faces is likewise given by birth and by later circumstances, but she emphasizes that we go overboard when we seek to improve our faces beyond what these natural circumstances produce.

At best, the nature of the cosmetic art is neutral-on-the-side-of-evil, like a poisonous mushroom that can only be used with the greatest moderation and the most tentative care. Like such a mushroom, its power is not our own; we must use cosmetics (if at all) with humility in the knowledge that we are only temporary caretakers of the beauty of our faces. If we do not recognize that our faces have this status, and if we come to believe that we have the power to make ourselves beautiful on our own terms, we directly challenge God's providence.

God is the master painter; we should be the humble apprentices.

Such a challenge against God's providence issues partly from a kind of pride in the power to change one's face, but also from vanity. If a person is dissatisfied with her face, she is claiming that her face does not meet a given aesthetic norm. When she takes the next step and tries to fix the supposed defects in her face, she prioritizes this norm over every other purpose that her face might fulfill. She ignores the fact that in God's providence, she might have been made ugly for a greater purpose. Equally bad, she tries to look different than she is, or like someone she is not. Agatha's fifth objection includes the following observations in this vein:

This last point is similar to that argument used by women of the same period who put black spots on their faces so as better to show the beauty in the whiteness of the rest of their faces.[34] Agatha goes on to explain how many things in nature work on the same principle, such as clouds/stars, night/day, winter/summer (46-47). Without rejecting the maxim that all of God's works are ultimately good, she is implying that some of God's creations inherently have negative characteristics, so that we might see all the more clearly the inherently positive characteristics of other creations. This argument supports her claim that some arts can be inherently bad, on the ground that such arts use the negative characteristics of God's gifts without setting them against the positive characteristics of these or other gifts.

Mary Kay might argue in return that in the case of cosmetics, women focus more on the beautifying qualities of the cosmetic products than on the defects of their faces. But this point would bring Agatha back to her original charge: dissatisfaction with the beauty of the face, despite the possible good in the face as it is, leads to the condemnable dissimulation that cosmetics provide. Furthermore, Mary Kay shows time and again that she is more interested in the face than in the cosmetics themselves.

It must be difficult for Agatha to believe that last phrase--"without any fear or suspicion of sin"--when Mary Kay so clearly displays what Agatha sees as the sins of pride and vanity.

Agatha may accept Mary Kay's contention that true piety concerns both body and soul, but she would be quick to point out that the soul must take precedence. Agatha's as yet unanswered criticism, "Painting the Face argues an heart unsatisfied with God's works and disposings," is the title of her sixth objection. In it she adduces several of the points I have already discussed:

Agatha says in sum that every attempt to alter God's providence, especially where it concerns our bodies, is morally wrong.

Mary Kay's answer is that Agatha is only half right. Mary Kay agrees that we ought not seek "any means forbidden by the written Word of God, whereby to remove or alter what God hath so inflicted," but she reemphasizes that we are allowed and even expected to use good means that God has given for that express purpose (68-69). Here Mary Kay returns to analogy and shows convincingly, if ostentatiously, that the implications of Agatha's perspective are untenable:

In this argument Mary Kay returns to her idea that the body and face have no special relation to God's providence; their proportions and colors are of the same character as other objects and law of nature. If Agatha is correct, Mary Kay argues, we are prohibited from using any arts at all or even from taking any step contrary to the usual ways of nature. On the contrary, Mary Kay points out that we are permitted and even obliged to use "lawful means of honest variations and happy changes" (74).

It is important to note, however, that Mary Kay still has not adequately explained how a woman who thinks her face is ugly can tell whether she is fixing it for the sake of beauty or if she desires to fix it out of pride or vanity. The motives for climbing a ladder or rowing a boat seem to be quite different than the motives for applying cosmetics. Furthermore, various claims of virtue and vice seem to stick more easily to the art of face-painting than to the other arts, which are more obviously "neutral" arts (in fact, arts such as boat-rowing may be better classified as skills). Agatha has argued that our weak consciences can easily be fooled into taking a wrong as a right, and Mary Kay has not answered the challenge except to say that we also can be fooled into taking a right as a wrong. Agatha's challenge remains: women who are dissatisfied with their faces use cosmetics out of pride and vanity, so how can a good woman trust her conscience well enough to know that she uses cosmetics with purer motives?[38]

Often Mary Kay makes fascinating statements about cosmetics like "it may be used by many as an help of infirmity, without any pride or vanity" (34). How can a woman see her face as corrupted by infirmity and at the same time feel not a mote of vanity or wounded pride? One solution the women have advanced is that if the woman believes that the face is not her own, but a creation of God's of which she is the steward, she may safely and modestly beautify it, to the glory of God.[39] Mary Kay argues that when this face, on loan from God, loses its beauty, it is a positive duty of the woman to cure such infirmity. In doing her duty, she need make no connection between the beauty of "her" face, on the one hand, and her own personal merit on the other. Mary Kay later notes that humility and holiness do not require "any dislike of outward comeliness" (42). But how many women, Agatha asks, have this unusual view of their bodies while they are applying cosmetics?[40]

Both women remain exceedingly polite to each other throughout the dialogue. Their dispute remains "moderate and charitable" (258) in part because they share nearly the same conception of the hierarchy of moral authorities. Each is able to use terms that the other understands, and they both can build their cases around a similar rhetoric of nature. Furthermore, they both admit, although to different degrees, that conscience and other human motives are important, difficult to discern, and often mixed with sin. While Mary Kay stresses the aesthetic norm of beauty for the face and the duty to use our God-given creativity, Agatha is willing to grant these in a limited way, but Agatha stresses the process by which a guilty conscience finds specious arguments to make the art of cosmetics seem less troublesome than it really is.

Each woman, at times, might make a point that is more helpful to the other. For example, at one point Mary Kay seems to admit that women do generally wear cosmetics out of a motive of vanity:

Agatha would add that the actions of such women might show that they are just as willing to part company with God in their souls, for the sake of their bodies. Otherwise, Agatha might almost believe that Mary Kay concurs with her assertion that "all [emph. added] adding of colour and complexion to the face comes from Pride" (126). In a second instance, Mary Kay admits:

The unfortunate truth, both women agree, is that we all succumb to pride in innumerable ways.

In turn, Agatha, in her final words, seems to have been won over to Mary Kay's position. She grudgingly acknowledges that it is possible to use cosmetics "with those cautions of modesty and discretion which are necessary to accompany all our actions" (261). I think she is speaking with some skepticism here, because she probably still believes that it is nearly impossible to have the kind of pure motives that Mary Kay has sometimes offered in defense of cosmetics. At the very least, Agatha is displaying the good humor which has characterized the entire dialogue.

The book concludes with a quotation from scripture, a moral authority on which both women can agree wholeheartedly: "To the pure all things are pure; but to the defiled and unbelievers nothing is pure, but even their mind and conscience is defiled."[41]