Time Tested Beauty Tips

For attractive lips, speak words of kindness.
For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people.
For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.
For beautiful hair, let a child run his fingers through it once a day.
For poise, walk with the knowledge you’ll never walk alone…
People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed and redeemed and redeemed and redeemed.

Never throw out anybody.

Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, you’ll find one at the end of your arm.

As you grow older you will discover that you have two hands. One for helping yourself, the other for helping others.

--Sam Levenson

This was one of Audrey Hepburn's favorite poems. And though it wasn't, it could have been written expressly about her.

Show off, do good

The better your vocabulary, the more rice these guys donate through the UN World Food Program.

Don't ask me how or why - but tell all your prolix, sesquipedalian friends about it.

Cause marketing, because...

I like the Dove campaign, "Real Beauty," for multiple reasons. I like the message it's trying to send to females young and old about beauty, looks, and expectations. I like the means - the TV ads are eminently watchable, over and over again. I like the production values - the magazine ads are beautifully shot and lit. I like the models - they are real and they communicate Dove's message that beauty comes in many sizes, shapes and colors; they all look beautiful in these shots.

What I particularly like, however, is Dove's ingenuity. We all know that linking your brand to a cause can be a very effective and 'sticky' method of creating brand preference. It certainly helps your cause (pun intended) if there are sincere motives behind the effort, but sometimes those are difficult, if not impossible to gauge. Several brands spring to mind as having done an excellent job, both for the cause itself as well as for creating that indelible link in your mind. Revlon is to ?? as ?? is to AIDS Research. (answer: women's cancers, MAC Cosmetics - mind you, these are not the only correct answers - thank goodness!).

Dove has taken this one step further. They've created their very own campaign for their own cause. I'm not sure if the ad campaign begat the cause or vice versa, and I'm not sure it matters. The Dove campaign for real beauty - and the corrollary "self esteem fund" - fills a hole that you (or at least, I) didn't realize existed - and in such a way as to make you say "why hasn't there been such a campaign before?" For a 'beauty' company to tackle so directly the notion of female beauty in our society, for a consumer product goods company to attempt to lift the curtain on the actuality of how those images hocking those goods are created - this is big stuff.

Don't get me wrong - I can see where the whole thing can be considered somewhat (or very) self-serving, but that is, after all, the nature of campaigns. Nonetheless, I think there is merit and value in Dove’s Real Beauty campaign – and I am happy to see it on billboards and TV screens everywhere.