John Webster's contributions to the 1615 edition of Overbury's Characters includes a ‘fayre and happy Milke-mayd’, whom Webster describes as

Character devising was primarily a rhetorical exercise, a chance for writers to flex their wit and satirical muscles. Webster describes the milk-maid's beauty and charm within an anti-cosmetic context. She does not use art to make herself beautiful, instead she is ‘decked with innocence’ and her labour provides her with the health and vitality that would draw beauty to her cheeks. Webster seemingly participates in an anti-cosmetic discourse in this example, by raising nature above art, but it is a rhetorical exercise whereby, skillfully, he surpasses the anti-cosmetic polemicists by using wit, literary form and metaphor to address the issue of beauty within a fairly new genre. Similarly, in his dramatic works, Webster seems to denigrate cosmetic embellishment; for example, in The Devil's Law-Case, painting is described as ‘odious’ and women described as ‘creatures made up and compounded / Of all monsters, poisoned minerals, / And sorcerous herbs that grows’ (IV, ii, 291–3).