About ugly women, or "I won't drink that much"

A Pikabu user under the nickname vad. nes shared his rather contradictory opinion about how much women's appearance has changed over the past 150 years. Why now there are many more beautiful representatives and who used to be considered the first beauties. Next — the words of the author.

I wanted to talk about things that are apolitical and pleasant. About female beauty, for example. According to my grandmother, a lot of beautiful people have appeared now. And indeed, due to my profession, I have to work quite a lot with photographs of the late XIX-early XX centuries. Do you know what is most surprising? The number of ugly people.

Isadora Duncan

This is especially noticeable in women. No, there is no doubt, men are also not entirely Alain Delons, there are many more ugly than now (one smallpox oh, how much she tried for this), but in general the situation is tolerable. With women, it is disastrous! Like in that old joke:

In group female photos — one or two "conditionally cute" by today's standards, by then-fatal beauties. And these are not peasant women with their heavy share, the faces of people working in the field and early aging, no!

A group of graduates of the Smolny Institute with teachers.

Faith is Cold

I couldn't understand for a long time — what's the matter? Well, this can't be, you can't deceive nature, beautiful women are born at all times about the same number, Where have they gone since the invention of photography and until about the 30s of the XX century?

If you come across an old photo depicting a beautiful woman, it is either a photo of a picturesque portrait (artists are still flatterers!), or a photo of the 30s of the 20th century. That's when the beauties went in a joint, it's very expensive to see. Stop! And here it came to me. The answer is just two words — the beauty industry.

Despite the fact that women's cosmetics and other means of deceiving men appeared in ancient Egypt, almost no one used them. The beauty industry appeared only after the First World War, and by the age of 30, the results of the mass application of the first developments became visible.

The thing is that throughout human history, a woman did not have to be beautiful. That is, it was not forbidden at all, but it was not particularly welcomed. By and large, why is beauty necessary for a woman who spends her whole life in only two statuses: "a snotty little girl" and "a respectable mother of a family"?

Mata Hari

And why? A woman needs beauty only for one thing — to attract a man. To excite him, and to awaken, excuse me, sinful thoughts in him in relation to himself. A woman needs this skill for a very short period of time — when the girl has already grown up, and she does not have a husband yet.

It is not for nothing that a woman has always been compared to a flower that blooms a magnificent bud for a brief moment, and then flies around forever.

Matilda Kshesinskaya

Because if you have a husband, it is no longer necessary to attract and lure him, and other men... and other men were required to attract, sorry, only a completely certain kind of women. It was they-harlots, whores and prostitutes-who basically pulled on their fragile shoulders the entire beauty industry throughout human history.

But, of course, their pathetic amateurism could not bring any serious result. Look at the portraits of the classic of Russian photography Maxim Dmitriev. These are Nizhny Novgorod prostitutes, and not just any, but elite, from a high-class salon, for whose services merchants paid huge money at that time.

Elite prostitutes Valerie, Felden, Gustova, Boikova.

Well, how do you like the priestesses of love of those times?

Elite prostitutes Boykova, Tosye, Venerskaya, Ruzhevich.

The usual "ticket" prostitutes looked something like in the photos from the police archives of Nizhny Novgorod. Therefore, keep in mind — until the second decade of the XX century, the ability to make a woman beautiful simply did not exist. And only the emerging beauty industry has changed the situation radically.

Sonka Golden Pen.

It was the most natural revolution, women began to differ from their mothers and grandmothers in about the same way as model factory shoes differ from old-fashioned bast shoes.

It is to confirm this thesis that this text is illustrated with photos of the first beauties of those times. Fatal women whose beauty is undeniable, who drove the most powerful of this world crazy, and the best poets of those times wrote poems about them that are taught at school today.