How to be beautiful! – “Train Your Lips To Express Beauty Advises Lillian Gish”

How to be beautiful! – “Train Your Lips To Express Beauty Advises Lillian Gish”

How to be beautiful! – “Train Your Lips To Express Beauty Advises Lillian Gish”

By Esther Hoffman
Photographer Vandamm - NYPL Lillian Gish as Ophelia in Guthrie McClintic's Hamlet 1936 - detail
Photographer Vandamm – NYPL Lillian Gish as Ophelia in Guthrie McClintic’s Hamlet 1936 – detail
One of the prettiest mouths that speaks the eloquent silent language of the moving pictures is that of Lillian Gish. She has the short upper lip that is shaped like cupid’s bow and the under lip that some poet has described as “being stung by the bee that was sipping honey there.”
It is a mouth made for expressing love, although it has the soft curving lips of a child.
“A girl who has a beautiful mouth will always be called lovely,” a man said to me the other day, and yet few women train their lips to express beauty.
German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 35452, 1928-1929. Photo United Artists.
“Can you train your lips to express beauty?” I asked.
“You can train your mouth to express anything,” she answered, uncompromisingly. “Indeed you are always training, either consciously or subconsciously, your mouth to express something.”
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“If you think ugly thoughts your mouth will be hard and cynical. If you love every one and look upon the bright side of life you will keep the sweet trusting mouth of a child.”
How to be beautiful - Train your lips (Esther Hoffman)
How to be beautiful – Train your lips (Esther Hoffman)

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