Beauty Secrets – Buffalo Bill Style

Believe it or not, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody once shared a handful of beauty secrets-yes, really! A web search today returns more than 3.5 million results for “beauty hints and tips.” I’m guessing that Buffalo Bill’s weighing in on the subject is the classic “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

A female reporter from the Nebraska State Journal interviewed Cody on May 11, 1901. She suggests that audiences of his Wild West show tended to overlook Colonel Cody’s finer points.

“These minor beauties consist of a man with an elegantly arched foot, a certain caressing way in which the colonel’s hair curls about his buckskin collar, and finally, a skin as soft and as smooth as a baby’s,” she writes. “…and the tender wave in the colonel’s hair, there is every reason to believe, is something he has neither begged nor borrowed, nor paid for at the barber’s. It is a touch of nature that couldn’t be rubbed out even if the colonel wanted to have it done. Not that he does.”

The reporter contends that the Great Showman’s skin is baby soft and that “a fashionable woman would pawn her diamonds to have a skin like his.” So, she asks Cody, “Don’t you do anything to keep yourself in good physical condition? Don’t you have to fight fat? Do you never find yourself setting stooped? Above all, how do you manage that rose leaf skin?”

“I don’t do anything. Such as it is, I was born with it.”

“Exactly! So was I born with one like it. The question is: How did you manage to hang on to it?”

“You want the story of my life?”

“In a nutshell. Better still, in a capsule, to be administered to women wanting to reform their complexions.”

“Well, it won’t have to be a large capsule. About three grains of wisdom is all I can give them. First, be born with pure blood; second, live an out-of-door life; third, don’t overeat.

Indeed, 114 years later, beauty secrets haven’t changed much.