What the Experts Say about the Dave Barry Weight Loss Device
“Yes! Okay! It is very good! People should buy it! Now please, let us go!”—A team of leading physicians speaking in unison from inside a concrete structure
“The water used in Tokyo, Yokohama, Kawasaki, and other parts of the metropolitan area is supplied by aqueduct systems!”—The Encyclopaedia BritannicaVolume 18 (Taylor-Utah)
Chapter 9. Women’s Beauty And Grooming
Thus far in this book, we’ve concentrated on improving your body. But let’s face it: having a great body does you no good whatsoever if you have the kind of face where people are always saying you have a Nice Personality, meaning you can cause crops to fail just by looking at them.
So in this chapter, we’re going to take a look at some of the things you can do to your face and hair to give yourself that feeling of inner confidence that says, in the words of the song Maria sang in West Side Story just before her lover stabbed her brother to death, “I Feel Pretty.” You’ll see that you don’t have to have been born with great genes to look beautiful; there are lots of simple little “beauty secrets” that can turn even a real woofer into an extremely presentable person, although in your case I would not necessarily rule out plastic surgery.
The First Step toward a More Beautiful You
The most important step, of course, is to recognize that whatever you’re currently doing is totally wrong. What you need is a New Look, as you know if you read any of the major women’s beauty magazines. Month after month, year after year, they publish the same article, which is “Several Dozen New Ways to Put Makeup on Your Face and Style Your Hair in a Lifelong Futile Effort to Look Like the Model on the Cover.”
The reason the beauty experts keep coming up with new looks is that the old ones are all repulsive. You look back at your high school yearbook or, heaven help you, your mother’s yearbook, and you see the Looks that were popular years ago, and you wonder how the human race managed to reproduce. You wonder why men and women didn’t take one look at each other and sprint in opposite directions until they dropped from exhaustion. Someday your children will say the same thing about the way you look today, which is why we here in the beauty industry are always pushing back the frontiers of knowledge, coming up with New Looks, with no real hope of personal financial benefit beyond the sale of beauty products that cost more per ounce than all but the finest narcotics.
Sometimes, out of the goodness of our hearts, we beauty experts make guest appearances on those morning television shows devoted to a wide range of topics that the folks who run television feel are of interest to women, namely these:
Sex problems Fashion and beauty tips Problems that involve sex Tips on beauty and fashion Various sexually involved problems Discussions of how you can become more sexually fashionable and beautiful by means of certain tips Pasta
What the beauty experts generally do on these shows is select a woman from the audience and point out how she has committed several dozen common major beauty blunders due to the fact that she is not a knowledgeable beauty expert. Their technique is to pick somebody who looks perfectly normal—perhaps even attractive—to the unprofessional eye, then harp away at her until the audience begins to marvel that she managed to get past the studio guards without being mistaken for an escaped boar and shot.
Then they take this pathetic woman, and they give her a completely New Look, offering all kinds of professional beauty tips as they go along:
“Now the most unfortunate facial characteristic of Rhonda here,” they say, “is that she has a nose you could hang a garment bag on, so we are going to begin by applying about five-eighths of an inch of base coat to the rest of her head in an effort to make it appear larger. We’ll top that off with two coats of sealant, then we’ll remove all of Rhonda’s current eyebrows and start applying the first few coats of skin dye while we try to think up something we can do about her mouth.”
And so on, until Rhonda’s face is encased in congealed cosmetic substances to the point where her own dog wouldn’t recognize her. As the studio audience applauds her New Look enthusiastically, Robert Redford walks onstage and asks her to marry him, and they walk off together, living proof of the advantages of knowledgeably applied beauty products, at least until Rhonda’s sealant weakens and her base coat starts falling off in slabs the size of French toast.
What You, Personally, Need to Do about Your Appearance
Unfortunately, we are dealing with the print medium here, so I am unable to consult individually with you in regard to your specific beauty needs, except to say that from this particular angle it appears you ought to give a bit more thought to booger removal. However, I can offer these helpful beauty guidelines for you to bear in mind as you try to achieve your New Look:
GUIDELINE 1: YOUR FACE IS MUCH TOO FAT.
It looks like a weather balloon, for God’s sake. Try some puce blush on your cheekbones, if you can locate them, and accentuate those little lines coming out of the sides of your mouth by filling them in lightly with an Accountant’s Fine Point Bic pen.
GUIDELINE 2: I CAN’T BELIEVE WHAT HAS BEEN DONE TO YOUR HAIR.
I am assuming that you didn’t pay for that cut. I am assuming that a deranged, near-blind, palsied person wielding pruning shears burst into your room in the dead of night and cut your hair after beating you unconscious. The only thing I can suggest until it grows back out is that you join some sort of religious order that has a mandatory head covering. And when it does grow back, you want to decide which of the three common head shapes, you have and choose a hairstyle that compliments it.
GUIDELINE 3: I WOULD SAY YOUR EYES ARE YOUR BEST FEATURE.
This is assuming I have to pick something. You want to draw attention to your eyes through subtle use of your lipstick. Note that when I say your eyes are your best feature, I am speaking of them as independent organs. Taken as a set, they are maybe three-quarters of an inch too close together.
Personal Hygiene
After going to all that trouble with your face and hair, the last thing you want to do is go around smelling like a billy goat with a flatulence problem. This is why good personal hygiene habits are so important. Let’s review them briefly.
TEETH
You should brush them immediately before having conversations, using a tube of toothpaste with these words printed on the side: “The American Dental Association has found this to be an effective tube of toothpaste when squeezed from the bottom in conjunction with a program of regular payments to a member of the American Dental Association.”