In Alexander Oldys’s 1683 The London Jilt, his titular heroine Cornelia provides her readers with a cosmetics lesson. She explains that she “took some Spanish Wool, which I macerated some hours in Brandy, by the force whereof, the Tincture of the Spanish Wool began to lose it self, and if one wet or rubbed any place therewith, it communicated a colour, which seem’d to be altogether natural.” In fact, the color of her cheeks does not just “seem” natural; Cornelia brags that it resembles something “which Nature produced.” Cornelia’s ability to create an artificial blush that looks naturally inspired places her actions in dialogue with advice found in conduct manuals written over a century earlier. Thomas Salter, for instance, tells a virgin to “bee readie but not to[o] bolde,” in order to “shewe her vertue … by a sodaine blushing, whiche immediately will overspread her lillie cheeks with roseate read.” While Salter’s subject is hoping to display a trait that one would not expect to be part of Cornelia’s repertoire—virtue and innocence—both women demonstrate that a blush, a physiological reaction whose appearance is supposed to indicate the presence of an honestly experienced emotion, can be feigned or fabricated; it is something that can be shown in order to elicit a pointed response. This repetition points to the fact that the blush as both “a token of modesty, and yet an amorous sign” continually serves a doubled purpose: to announce desire even as it asserts chastity. We do not know if Salter’s virgin was successful in convincing her audience of her virginity, but Cornelia’s expertise appears not to be questioned by any of her customers. As she tells us, “I knew how to dissemble to Perfection,” and she receives no complaints.

That we are witness to a moment where a fictional prostitute allows us to see behind the scene, as it were, of her toilette is far from a rare occurrence. Seventeenth-century prostitute texts provide us with a multitude of versions of what Thomas Overbury, in one of his character sketches of a whore, calls “prostitute countenances.” We watch prostitutes decorate their chambers for visitors, prepare their bodies and faces for examination, cultivate particular personas for private and public audiences.