When I received my PhD, my examiners asked how I came up with the idea to write about early modern cosmetics. I blushed because I did not really want to tell them that it came to me in the months before I started my PhD when I was working at a cosmetics counter at Bloomingdales in Newport Beach, California. They laughed though, and said I should mention it in my preface. So here it is. I was amazed at the amount of money that women were spending on cosmetics. Literally thousands of dollars a day were lavished on lipstick, eye shadow and concealer. I found myself judging these women, and had to ask myself why. Why should they be judged for beautifying themselves? Then I remembered Bosola's attack on painted ladies in The Duchess of Malfi, and I thought that there was something profoundly disturbing in the images he uses to describe cosmetic practices; for example, women who flay their skin to obtain a smooth complexion end up looking like ‘abortive hedgehogs’. It made me want to grapple with the ideological paradoxes at the heart of Western conceptions of beauty and the processes of beautification that respond to such conceptions. I have spent a lot of years on this and have found too much information; my only hope is that I have brought it together lucidly and coherently and that it invites further discussion and debate.