The other day in discourse you mentioned that when a woman wears red lipstick it is ugly because it is not natural."
In the first place, that woman is ugly — that's why she wears lipstick. If she had beautiful lips, who would bother to paint those beautiful lips with something tasteless, ugly? — ugly in the sense that your lips are no longer part of your face. They stand out, they become separate; they are no longer an organic unity.
I would like women to have red lips, but those red lips should come through the inner health — through blood circulating within your body, through exercise, through breathing; through long walks, through sunbaths, lips should become red. It is beautiful to have red lips, but to pretend…! And for whom are you trying to pretend?
Everybody can see the lipstick is there. The lipstick does not hide your lips, it simply reveals that something ugly is hidden behind it. And I am not saying that all that is not natural is bad. Nature CAN be improved upon. That's what intelligence is for, but it should not be against nature. For example, the lips can be red through better food, through better exercise, through better medicine. That too is improving upon nature, but improving upon nature in a natural way.
Putting on lipstick is cheap; it is not really improving. It is good for the stage. Makeup artists are needed for the stage, not for real life. On the stage it is good, because the people who are looking at you are far away from you; they don't have to kiss you. They can throw kisses from far away; that's perfectly okay. But they don't have to taste your lipstick. Layers and layers of lipstick! It is so rotten and old, and continuously your saliva is giving it all kinds of germs.
In each single kiss at least one hundred thousand germs pass between the lovers. And that is when the lips are without lipstick. With lipstick nobody has yet counted what is being transferred. And when the lipstick is there you never come in contact with the lips.
You must have misunderstood me. I am not saying that improving upon nature is bad. I am not saying that. Women can shave their legs and underarms. It is good, it is hygenic; nothing is wrong in it. Unless you take every care to clean your body….
If you take a bath every day and clean your body, then the hairs under your arms are not bad. There is nothing wrong about it. There is no need to remove them, they have their place. But if you are not taking a bath and if you are not being hygenic and clean, then certainly they will collect dust and they will collect perspiration and they will stink.
Then it is good to remove them. I am not against removing them. It is beautiful to shave the hairs on your legs and give your legs a beautiful shape.
Improve upon nature, rather than impose. Make people more aware of their beauty and how to take care of it. Help them in natural ways. Man is the only animal who can go beyond nature, but he should go through nature, not cover nature. So I am not saying that that which is not natural is necessarily ugly.
But you must have misunderstood me. You must have heard with your freelance makeup artist's mind.
OSHO