and as it were peculiarly upon women that instrumental mean of womanly ostentation, the radiances of jewels wherewith necklaces are variegated, and the circlets of gold wherewith the arms were compressed, and the medicaments of archil with which wools are colored, and that black powder itself wherewith the eyelids and eyelashes are made prominent. What is the quality of these things may be declared meantime, even at this point, from the quality and condition of their teachers; in that sinners could never have either shown or supplied anything conducive to integrity, unlawful lovers anything conducive to chastity, renegade spirits anything to the fear of God. If [these things] are to be called teachings, ill masters must of necessity have taught ill; if as wages of lust, there is nothing base of which the wages are honorable. But why was it of so much importance to show these things as well as to confer them? Was it that women without material causes of splendor, and without ingenious contrivances of grace, could not please men, who, while still unadorned and uncouth, and—so to say—crude and rude, had moved [the mind of] angels? Or was it that the (angelic) lovers would appear sordid and—through gratuitous use—contumelious, if they had conferred no [compensating] gift on the women who had been enticed into connubial connection with them? But these questions admit of no calculation. Women who possessed angels [as husbands] could desire nothing more; they had, forsooth, made a grand match. Assuredly they who of course, did sometimes think whence they had fallen, and, after the heated impulses of their lusts, looked up toward heaven, thus requitted that very excellence of women, natural beauty, as [having proved] a cause of evil, in order that their good fortune might profit them nothing but that, being turned from simplicity and sincerity they together with [the angels] themselves, might become offensive to God. Sure they were that all ostentation and ambition, and love of pleasing by carnal means, was displeasing to God."
Tertullian on Female Dress, Chap. II.
