“When You Come to the End of a Perfect Day,” by Dorothy Parker, was originally published in the November 1917 issue of Vogue.
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It all started when I crossed the French gray threshold of Mme. Claudine, beauty specialist. Up to that time, I have always considered myself happy. My life was singularly free from care and sorrow, and I knew nothing of the bitterness of labour. But that is all over now. I will never be the innocent girl that I was before Mme. Claudine, beauty specialist. came into my life. I may pet over it, but I shall never be the same.
You see, I have always had a longing to be beautiful. It was a veritable obsession with me. As a result of having people say to me, in early youth. “Don’t you care—handsome is as handsome does,” or “Never you mind. dear, it isn’t always a pretty face that attracts the men,” I grew quite bitter about the thing. I took every pretty woman as a personal affront, and every time some unusually dazzling creature passed me, I murmured, resentfully, “‘There, but for the grace of God, go I!” But, though I longed with all my heart to be beautiful, I never took any action about it. I didn’t know exactly what to do. I realized that there were far too many beautiful women in this world for beauty to be a mere gift of nature, but I had no idea how it was attained,—that is, I had no idea until I went to see Mme. Claudine. Mme. Claudine’s mauve and French pray salon was a deceit-fully unbusinesslike place, cloying with the odours of myriad creams and powders. Mme. Claudine herself was tall and dark and exquisitely painted, clad in a gray gown that looked as if it had been put on with a brush. She had a manner singularly at variance with her looks, for she was brisk and businesslike, and she spoke volubly, in a clear, rather loud voice.
The Etceteras of Beauty
When women stop wanting to be beautiful, and Mme. Claudine is forced to discontinue her business as a beauty specialist, another calling is awaiting her. She can become an agent for “The Lives and Letters of the World’s Greatest Composers,” in fourteen volumes; so unmistakable a talent I have never seen. In half an hour she had sold me more creams, lotions, soaps, ointments, and appliances than I had even known existed. When the case containing all the articles was deposited in my hall that afternoon, I could not believe that it held my purchases. I thought that some one had played a joke on me and sent me a Ford.
Mme. Claudine was nothing if not thorough. She set down a diet list, rigidly excluding everything palatable, she wrote a series of exercises, and she gave me a folio of instructions as to the exact use of each aid to beauty that I had acquired. It seemed that the important part of the treatment was that it must be applied at night, just before retiring. The last hour, before I went to bed, was to be the busiest hour of the day. She gave me the impression that everything would be ruined if the rites were con- ducted by daylight. It must all be done at night,—the exercises most be gone through, the lotions applied, the contrivances to bring beauty nearer must be donned. Those were her last words to me, “Remember, at night, just before you go to bed.”