This excerpt from one of many articles published in the Girl's Own Paper on the subject of girls’ appearance embodies several of the major transformations in how female beauty was understood in the Victorian period. First, it proclaims that beauty is ‘never a “fixed quantity”’, something a woman is either born with or permanently lacks (299). The permeability of a girl's or woman's appearance depends on numerous factors, including ‘the variable spirit within, on expression, on setting, on an infinite amount of things that change it as we look’ (299). Second, the anonymous author takes the malleable nature of beauty to mean that women owe it to themselves and others to improve their appearance. The author identifies attention to ‘health, manner, and dress’ as the means to make ‘all the difference between plainness and good looks’ (299). The idea that sustained attention to health, character and clothing could produce beauty helped to create a new industry and the new expectation for women to perform a daily beauty regimen.

Nevertheless, the trajectory of beauty and consumer culture is not nearly as straightforward as this might suggest. This article from the Girl's Own Paper identifies one of the prime complicating factors to the idea that female beauty could be created by a woman who had been born, or who had become through age or illness, unattractive. The author describes the ‘Professional Beauty’ – personalities who obtained celebrity status primarily for their appearance – as ‘a reproach to English womanhood’ for her perversion of a ‘good and sacred gift’ (299). The notion that beauty could be used by women ‘as a key to open forbidden doors’ and ‘turned into a power for evil’ speaks to the sensitivity of the subject of artifice and the association of beauty with danger in certain circumstances (299).