The FIRST most important step, of course, is to recognize that whatever you're currently doing is totally wrong. What you need is a New Look, as you know if you read any of the major women's beauty magazines. Month after month, year after year, they publish the same article, which is 'Several Dozen New Ways to Put Makeup on your Face', 'Style Your Hair in a Lifelong Futile Effort', 'Look Like the Model on the Cover...' and so on.

The reason the beauty experts keep coming up with new looks is that the old ones are all repulsive. You look back at your high school yearbook or, heaven help you, your mother's yearbook, and you see the 'Looks' that were popular years ago, and you wonder how the human race managed to reproduce. You wonder why men and women didn't take one look at each other and sprint in opposite directions until they dropped from exhaustion.

Someday your children will say the same thing about the way you look today, which is why experts in the beauty industry are always pushing back the frontiers of knowledge, coming up with New Looks, with no real hope of personal financial benefit beyond the sale of beauty products that cost more per ounce than all but the finest narcotics, Sometimes, out of the goodness of our hearts, beauty experts make guest appearances on those morning television shows devoted to a wide range of topics that the folks who run television feel are of interest to women, namely these:

What the beauty experts generally do on these shows is select a woman from the audience and point out how she has committed a several dozen common major 'beauty blunders' due to the fact that she is not a knowledge beauty expert. Their technique is to pick somebody who looks perfectly normal---perhaps even attractive-to the unprofessional eye, then harp away at her until the audience begins to marvel that she managed to get past the studio guards without being mistaken for an escaped boar and shot.

Then they take this pathetic woman, and they give her a completely New Look, offering all kinds of professional beauty tips as they go along:

'Now the most unfortunate facial characteristic of Rhonda here,' they say, 'is that she has a nose you could hang a garment bag on, so we are going to begin by applying about five-eighths of an inch of base coat to the rest of her head in an effort to make it appear larger. We'll top that off with two coats of sealant, then we'll remove all of Rhonda's current eyebrows and start applying the first few coats of skin dye while we try to think up something we can do about her mouth.'

And so on, until Rhonda's face is encased in congealed cosmetic substances to the point where her own dog won't recognize her. As the studio audience applauds her New Look enthusiastically, Robert Redford walks onstage, asks her to marry him, and they walk off together, living proof of the advantages of knowledgeably applied beauty products, at least until Rhonda's sealant weakens and her base coat starts falling off in slabs the size of French toast.