In a satirical poem called ‘A Paradox of a Painted Face’, written in the mid-seventeenth century, the author demonstrates the multivocality of the cultural attitude towards cosmetics by emphasising the contemporary attraction to painted faces, while using terms like ‘cunning’, ‘deceive’ and ‘fraud’ to demonstrate their association with hypocrisy:

It is a familiar paradox that painted beauty is alluring, but the attraction to artifice is slightly dubious on religious as well as on poetical grounds. A desire for deception, is implicit in the attraction to painted faces, and in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, painted artifice was a powerful material reminder of the human need for aesthetic pleasure. Thus there is a dialogical relationship between aesthetics and deception, which means that face painting can be viewed as an art form unto itself. Ovid, read widely in the Renaissance, instructs ladies in his Art of Love to use cosmetics to correct their natural deficiencies, but he tells them that they must hide it from their suitors, suggesting that it is their deception or artifice to which the potential suitors are attracted: ‘Why must I know the cause of the whiteness of your cheek? Shut your chamber door: why show the unfinished work? There is much that it befits men not to know; most of your doings would offend, did you not hide them within’.