The Beauty Specialist by Ruth Collie
"The Beauty Specialist" is a short dramatic monologue by Ruth Collie, structured as a one-sided conversation between a beauty-shop attendant and an unseen, unheard customer. The piece uses the conceit of a cosmetics consultation to deliver a series of witty, moralizing "recipes" for beauty that substitute wholesome, intangible virtues for physical products. The specialist greets her client with brisk professional courtesy, ushering her from counter to counter as though through an actual beauty parlor. Each item requested — an eye lotion, a face cream, a remedy for frayed nerves — is met with a formula that sounds like a cosmetic ingredient list but is actually built from abstract, moral, or emotional qualities. The eye lotion is "ten drops of rain, ten drops of dew," blended by a "scented breeze" — a fanciful, natural elixir rather than a manufactured product. The face cream, recommended as effective yet inexpensive, consists of "one ounce of laughter, smiles and twinkles," guaranteed to smooth wrinkles through genuine good humor rather than chemistry. For frayed or "jaded" nerves, the specialist prescribes sympathy for others' needs and the forgetting of one's own troubles by contemplating "world brotherhood" — accepting that a few grey hairs are a fair trade for a life well and generously lived. Throughout, the poem plays on the doubled meaning of a "beauty specialist's" trade: the customer arrives expecting artificial enhancement — lotions, creams, cosmetic fixes — and instead receives instruction in emotional and spiritual well-being. The specialist's patter mimics the rhythms of genuine salesmanship (the polished greeting, the confident recommendation, the closing question of "Take or send?"), which heightens the ironic gap between commercial beauty culture and the poem's actual prescriptions: laughter, kindness, sympathy, and selflessness. The humor lies in this mismatch, as ordinary consumer expectations are continually redirected toward homespun, moral remedies dressed up in the language of a boutique's product line. The closing line reinforces the poem's thesis explicitly: for all these "treatments," there is "naught to pay," underscoring that true beauty and ease of spirit cost nothing material — they are available to anyone willing to practice good humor, empathy, and generosity of feeling. The customer is dismissed cheerfully, having received — free of charge — a philosophy of contentment disguised as a shopping trip. Formally, the poem is written in rhymed, loosely metrical couplets and near-couplets that mimic the chatty, persuasive cadence of a salesperson's patter, giving the piece a light, comic tone even as it delivers earnest moral content. The device of embedding aphorisms about inner beauty within the specific, tactile vocabulary of a beauty parlor (lotions, creams, draughts, blends, ingredients) is the poem's central satirical and structural technique: it borrows the outward trappings of vanity and commerce to smuggle in an argument that genuine beauty is ethical and emotional rather than cosmetic. The specialist herself functions less as a literal character than as a personified voice of folk wisdom, using the marketplace as a stage for gently mocking a culture preoccupied with surface appearance, while affirming that cheerfulness, compassion, and community feeling are the true — and freely available — beautifying agents.
By Ruth Collie · Genre: Poetry, Allegory, Philosophical