晨读英语美文60篇(含lrc字幕) The Beauty Industry
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[00:00.00]The Beauty Industry
[00:06.51]The one American industry unaffected
[00:10.44]by the general depression of trade
[00:12.19]is the beauty industry.
[00:13.52]American women continue to spend on their faces and bodies
[00:18.22]as much as they spent before the coming of the slump—
[00:21.71]about three million pounds a week.
[00:24.65]These facts and figures are “official”,
[00:27.84]and can be accepted as being substantially true.
[00:31.65]The modern cult of beauty is not exclusively a function of wealth.
[00:37.24]If it were, then the personal appearance industries
[00:41.28]would have been as hardly hit by the trade depression
[00:43.69]as any other business.
[00:44.99]But, as we have seen,
[00:46.64]they have not suffered.
[00:48.40]Women are retrenching on other things than their faces.
[00:52.77]Women, it is obvious, are freer than in the past.
[00:57.36]Freer not only to perform the generally unenviable social functions
[01:03.60]hitherto reserved to the male,
[01:05.77]but also freer to exercise the more pleasing,
[01:09.07]feminine privilege of being attractive
[01:11.36]The fortunes are made justly
[01:14.10]by face-cream manufacturers and beauty-specialists,
[01:17.81]by the sellers of rubber reducing-belts and massage machines,
[01:23.06]by the patentees of hair-lotions
[01:26.23]and the authors of books on the culture of the abdomen.
[01:29.63]It is a success in so far as more women
[01:33.23]retain their youthful appearance to a greater age than in the past.
[01:37.50]The Portrait of the Artist’s Mother
[01:40.88]will come to be almost indistinguishable,
[01:44.17]at future picture shows,
[01:45.93]from the Portrait of the Artist’s Daughter.
[01:48.77]The success is part due to skin foods
[01:52.14]and injections of paraffin-wax,
[01:54.68]facial surgery, mud baths, and paint,
[01:58.50]and in part due to improved health.
[02:01.55]So far, some people,
[02:03.09]the campaign for more beauty is also a campaign for more health.
[02:07.46]Beauty that is merely the artificial shadow
[02:10.54]of these symptoms of health
[02:12.05]is intrinsically of poorer quality than the genuine article.
[02:16.56]Still, it is a sufficiently good imitation
[02:20.49]to be sometimes mistakable for the real thing.
[02:23.43]Every middle-income person can afford the cosmetic apparatus
[02:28.57]and more knowledge of the way
[02:30.33]in which real health can be achieved is being universally acted upon.
[02:35.03]When that happy moment comes,
[02:37.64]will every woman be beautiful-as beautiful,
[02:41.38]at any rate, as the natural shape of her features?
[02:44.22]The answer is apparent:
[02:46.41]No, for real beauty is as much an affair
[02:50.46]of the inner as of the outer self.