Beauty marks and the such

Yesterday i watched "Some like it hot", with Marilyn Monroe. Neat movie, but minds work strangely, and since mine is very weird --as it's been amply shown here-- it started mulling on the beauty mark Marilyn had above her lip. From there it locked on to the words "beauty mark" themselves. Why not simply "mole"? What is it about a mole that creates beauty? Placement? Maybe. I have a mole on my neck, but haven't been asked to star in any movies, so it probably doesn't qualify... Shape? My mole is lumpy and not totally round, with a couple of hairs coming out of it. They do say beauty is in the eye of the beholder though, so if you're interested, remind me to show it to you next time we meet.

Anyway, back to real beauty marks. I've read somewhere that two or three centuries ago they were the rage in France, particularly among the high classes. Except they weren't real beauty marks, but fake ones. Both men and women would glue bits of black taffeta to their faces in the hope of heightening their looks. But isn't a mole, by definition, an imperfection on the smooth surface that the skin is supposed to be? How could fake moles make them more beautiful? What the heck were they thinking?

The french aristocracy of the time has such a bad reputation already (i mean, their heads ended up being chopped off, so they must have been quite nasty) that i'm sure nobody would mind my interpretation: they thought themselves so perfect already, that they wanted to pretend they had imperfections, pretend being the keyword. "Hey, look" they were saying with their bits of black taffeta. "I'm so perfect that even my imperfections are fake."

But, as it turns out, i'm wrong. I got on the net and the story is quite different. Before i go on, and in case you're wondering, i do have much better things to do (i.e. homework) but it's boring.

In any case, the fashion of sticking bits of cloth to the face originated in England in the XVIth century, not in France. In that country and at that time, people would use not only black taffeta, but all kinds of fabric, and even leather, all dyed different colors. They'd plaster themselves with several pieces at a time, cut out in various shapes. It seems that smallpox was rampant, and these patches were supposed to cover the not-so-beautiful marks the sickness left behind. That it later became a fashion even for the unscarred is not so surprising, given the monkey-see-monkey-do monkeys that we are.

Me, if i'd had to choose, i would have worn the carriage and horses. Rather that than making a hole in my nose and hooking a bit of metal through it.