Natural and healthful beauty was roundly encouraged in Victorian women's print culture. Browne's poem ‘To the Girls’, published in the Girl's Own Paper, distils the overwhelming tenor of beauty advice of the period. Through the hand of God, nature was the source of a girl's or woman's beauty, and her looks could be no more flawed than that of a flower, tree or animal. A forceful preference for the natural was informed by a reverence for God's creation in the magazine. The use of cosmetics, or slavish adherence to fashion, therefore, took on a transgressive function beyond that of simple aesthetic preference. Healthful practices and thoughts would improve the character, influencing the expression, or external repre-sentation of the internal self, and these qualities could last until old age, unlike physical beauty, which would inevitably degrade. These premises are important to account for when considering the representation of beautiful women in Victorian fiction and the beauty advice professed in women's periodicals and advice manuals.

This chapter considers how the unassailable logic about natural, healthful beauty created unmeetable expectations, fostered a culture of cosmetic secrecy and judged vanity harshly. The rhetoric of harm and danger associated with cosmetics situated them as the antithesis of health and in conflict with true, natural beauty. This generated a tension for the authors of beauty manuals who had to remain on the right side of God – as embodied by the natural – and yet somehow satisfy women readers with solutions for improving their appearance. The imagined relationship between the natural, the healthful and beauty prompted a number of men with medical backgrounds to produce advice about, or assessments of, female beauty, which carried with them the authority of their profession, and had very different motivations to female-authored beauty advice manuals.