Beauty Beheld: A Retelling of Hansel and Gretel (The Classical Kingdoms Collection Book 3)

Product Information

The book this is from, fancifully titled "Enquire Within Upon Everything," was a sort of 1860s lifehacking guide, instructing readers on everything from vegetable pickling, making wax leaf impressions, and stain removal to card games and social dance moves (if you want to improve your valse à deux, look no further). I kissed brief hellos with his father and each of their close family friends before removing my coat and taking it to the small hall closet. How you look, your stance, your hair, your makeup, whether you appear pretty, your sex appeal: all of these things that coalesce in my brain, and maybe yours, to form a hum so low and so constant that I take it as a state of being—and when you want, they disappear. But I knew they were both qualities that people admired, and keeping in line with my sense of justice, I figured it was pretty much fate as to which one you got. Well—Lovelie took a long sip in a feeble attempt to hide a smirk behind her wine glass as she took a seat beside Emmanuel— we have a lot to be happy about tonight.

The idea was that the dark, heavy clothes men were expected to wear were unhygienic (it was difficult to wash a suit before widely available dry cleaning—indeed, that’s part of why suits are traditionally dark, to mask dirt), and ugly to boot (we’ll get to that). Looking “normal” is certainly no guarantee of actual compliance (thank heavens), but you wouldn’t know that from looking at the pile of knee-length skirts and tasteful kitten heels lying in our wake. So, complaining about having nothing in common with your girlfriend and how she has no career goals is ‘mostly just touching base’?She enjoys her challenging work as a voice actor, has a supportive network of family and friends, and is expecting a proposal from her long-term boyfriend, Daniel. The woman shook a thin coat of snow from her bust-length hair, which fell in soft waves over her cream sweater dress. And I personally know that he’ll never forgive you for costing him the best thing that’s ever happened to him, I hissed through gritted teeth. The sweet and spicy aroma of simmering food and the lively tunes of an Alan Cavé song instantly arrested my senses.

I didn’t need to break the crispy crusts open to know they held tender cutlets of beef, chicken, and pork. I settled on highlights, and I knew enough to go to a good place that I'd been to before for cuts and trusted. Meanwhile, the actual route to confidence about one’s sex appeal—having positive early sexual experiences—remains unconsidered in the culture at large, almost shooed aside in favor of juicier mental equations about sexual satisfaction. It’s one thing for Mary to be a virgin because she’s devoted to chastity; it’s quite another for her to be a virgin if it’s just that she couldn’t get laid.I look on the bright side: A woman of my age, with crow’s-feet and silver hair, would have never been modeling 20 years ago. Although his parents dreamed of him becoming an MD, Daniel desired more hands-on patient interaction as a nurse practitioner. The (erroneous) idea is from the same school of thought that sees parents shaving the heads of their daughters in an effort to make the hair grow back thicker and fuller.

I had been a virgin, and now I wasn’t, and these eyes were the ones I’d be seeing the world with from now on. This equation was never spoken aloud; nobody ever taught it to me, and certainly I knew better than to go around announcing it. It was too much power, I suppose, though I wouldn’t have used that word then, as power wasn’t high on my priorities in the second grade. I’d like to tell you that I watched a 7-year-old girl tripping on the hem of her angel’s robe, reciting scripture for the congregants to smile over, and saw that her prettiness was beside the point. A partial list of treatments used throughout history to amp up eyelash growth: white wine, mint, lavender vinegar, glycerine, “fluid extract of jaborandi” (an herb that is now used to make prescription glaucoma medicine), red vaseline, a mixture of cornflower and chervil, quinine, almond oil, kohl (personally recommended by the prophet Mohammed), Spanish fly, and myrtle extract, most of which may be applied to the lashes with “a tiny camel’s-hair paint-brush.Today it would look like the MDRP’s vision has won out, at least in America (though remember, the MDRP was British) with leisurewear accepted in plenty of professional workplaces and shorts no longer seen as the province of little boys. But this kind of supposed compliment goes to the heart of the real problem of street harassment: surveillance of women.